This Year's Biggest Blockbusters Instructed Us to Consume the Wealthy Again. We Still Aren't Listening.

A familiar idea runs through many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes far back to the days of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to throw the heroes into a prehistoric arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their financial benefit.

A Lineage of Cinematic Wealth Disparity

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people enduring abject destitution, while employing AI forgeries and a sophisticated propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its evil characters reside in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the lighthearted humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — for his own profit, of course.

There is little inherently notable in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is contrary to fundamental decency, and applaud the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.

The Release That Fails to Transform

However, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Every time lawmakers follow a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans innately link affluence to intelligence and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies promoting a contradictory message.

In fact, it looks as though the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes meaningful change. Provided with a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about good conquering evil. These movies are like ethical parables, implying that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will identify any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.

An Angrier Message in 2025

Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people function with a separate justice system, and are highly probable to buy their way out."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.

Key Outliers

There are exceptions, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid