This Year's Biggest Blockbusters Urged Us to Eat the Rich Again. We Yet Ignore the Message.
An age-old motif permeates many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches far back to the era of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro investing tens of millions to throw the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Film Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy 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 highest-grossing film, sets the resourceful people of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany farcical update of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — to make money, naturally.
It is not especially new in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against fat cats, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is contrary to core morality, and applaud the defusing, downfall, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
And yet, somehow, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers follow a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. Still the headlines demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating a contradictory message.
Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes real-world action. Given a regular dose of predominantly happily-ever-after tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like ethical parables, implying that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will root out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A Sharper Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more targeted, and seemingly more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exclusions
A few stories differ, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, 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 transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid