This Year's Top-Grossing Films Told Us to Eat the Rich Again. We Still Refuse to Listen.
A recurring theme courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends far back to the era of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through abject destitution, while employing deepfakes and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the resourceful inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish gleaming towers floating overhead. Even, the lighthearted humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to cause planetary doom — to make money, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the early days of film, with early comedies contrasting his always poor beloved underdog against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with 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 presume that affluence is incompatible with basic human values, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, somehow, we never actually eating the rich. On each occasion elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously link affluence to competence and value to society, even after decades of history's most popular movies conveying the reverse.
If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that hinders real-world action. Provided with a frequent serving of mostly uplifting fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater content about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, suggesting that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will root out any corrupt individuals among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more targeted, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era 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 oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
