2025’s biggest movies share one big message: Don’t trust billionaires

In The Running Man, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in desperate poverty, while using deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. Wicked: For Good doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz’s most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. Ne Zha 2, the year’s number one box-office hit, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Even the agreeably goofy comedy reboot The Naked Gun centers on a billionaire’s plot to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, of course.