🔗 Share this article This Year's Biggest Movies Urged Us to Take Down the Elite Once More. We Still Aren't Listening. An age-old theme runs through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that goes back in time to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to throw the heroes into a monster-filled death trap to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit. A Legacy of On-Screen Elite Villainy In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains enjoy conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, contrasts the resourceful inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Remarkably, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, of course. There’s nothing especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that rich people have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor Little Tramp character against tycoons, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful. The Release That Changes Nothing However, inexplicably, we never actually consuming the elite. Whenever politicians follow a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. Still the news demonstrates regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately equate riches with competence and social worth, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting the opposite. If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that impedes real-world action. Provided with a frequent serving of predominantly triumphant stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away satisfied about justice being served. These stories are like ethical parables, suggesting that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will root out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort. A Sharper Tone in 2025 But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more specific, and observably more lethal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*). "Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so clear that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out." The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to perish at the final act of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways. Notable Exclusions A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid