The Year's Top-Grossing Films Told Us to Eat the Rich Yet Again. We Still Refuse to Listen.
A familiar motif courses through many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches back in time to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul squandering tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people living in desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a sophisticated propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about wealth disparity as overtly, but its evil characters reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in opulent gleaming towers above the clouds. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, naturally.
It is not particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged desire for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme goes back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against fat cats, authority figures, 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 that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is contrary to basic human values, and exalt the defusing, downfall, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
However, for some reason, we never get around to eating the rich. Whenever elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by blaming violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the news reveals regularly 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 a contradictory message.
In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a steady diet of mostly triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away feeling good about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they indeed follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more fatal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people function with different standards, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, a setup that obviously 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 antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid