The Year's Most Popular Blockbusters Instructed Us to Eat the Rich Again. We Still Ignore the Message.
A familiar theme permeates a host of 2025's popular films. This concept which extends back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his vast wealth to defame Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while employing digital impersonations and a powerful smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its villains live in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the resourceful residents of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, of course.
It is not especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is at odds with core morality, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Whenever lawmakers follow a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously link affluence to smartness and importance, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of largely triumphant fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like ethical parables, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail finale, possibly since it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to perish at the final act of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exceptions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid