This Year's Biggest Movies Told Us to Eat the Rich Again. We Still Aren't Listening.
A recurring theme courses through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept which extends back in time to the time of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his immense fortune to smear Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about economic inequality as overtly, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing 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 film, contrasts the tough residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.
There is little especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Alters Little
Nevertheless, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Every time politicians follow a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies conveying the opposite.
If anything, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes meaningful change. Offered a regular dose of largely uplifting fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that the system works, and that plucky heroes will weed out any malicious actors among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they indeed follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more direct, and seemingly more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, 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, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Outliers
Some films diverge, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
