This Year's Top-Grossing Films Urged Us to Eat the Rich Yet Again. We Continue to Aren't Listening.
An age-old theme courses through many of 2025's popular films. This notion which extends all the way back to the time of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to defame Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people living in extreme hardship, while using digital impersonations and a powerful propaganda machine to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality quite that directly, but its evil characters reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to cause worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, naturally.
It is not especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against tycoons, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
However, somehow, we never actually consuming the elite. Whenever lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. Still the daily reports reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously link affluence to competence and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies promoting the reverse.
In fact, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a frequent serving of largely triumphant stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about good conquering evil. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Outliers
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the digital realm, teasing that he is 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 Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
