The Year's Top-Grossing Films Told Us to Eat the Rich Yet Again. We Still Ignore the Message.
A familiar motif courses through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea which extends far back to the time of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and framed her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of On-Screen Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people living in abject destitution, while using AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality as overtly, but its antagonists reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them from their homes and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a series of movies presupposing that the affluent have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
Nevertheless, somehow, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Whenever lawmakers follow a public shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — surely American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.
If anything, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a regular dose of largely uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These films are like ethical parables, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more targeted, and apparently more lethal. It’s rarely enough 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 subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people live by a separate justice system, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Outliers
There are exceptions, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
