This Year's Top-Grossing Films Instructed Us to Eat the Rich Yet Again. We Still Aren't Listening.
A recurring idea courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes far back to the time of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to defame Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending a fortune to throw the heroes into a monster-filled arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people living in extreme hardship, while using digital impersonations and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its villains live in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the resourceful residents of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent gleaming towers above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.
It is not particularly surprising in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled desire for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is at odds with core morality, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
However, somehow, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials respond to a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious regularly that a significant portion of Americans innately equate riches with smartness and importance, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.
If anything, it looks as though the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that hinders real-world action. Given a frequent serving of mostly happily-ever-after tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater content about good conquering evil. These stories are like cautionary fables, suggesting that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more specific, and seemingly more lethal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people gain some humility in humility, 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, greedy, hateful wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Outliers
Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
