The Year's Top-Grossing Films Urged Us to Eat the Rich Once More. We Continue to Refuse to Listen.
An age-old theme courses through many of 2025's popular films. This notion which extends back in time to the era of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to defame Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing vast sums to throw the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Film Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its antagonists live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them from their homes and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the tough inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish gleaming towers floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy farcical update of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against fat cats, bosses, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
However, for some reason, we never actually eating the rich. Every time elected officials follow a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. But the headlines reveals regularly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.
If anything, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that hinders meaningful change. Offered a regular dose of largely triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, implying that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will identify any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more specific, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough in the current era 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 oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exceptions
Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously 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 exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
