The Year's Top-Grossing Blockbusters Urged Us to Eat the Rich Once More. We Continue to Aren't Listening.

A familiar idea permeates many of 2025's popular films. This concept that stretches all the way back to the time of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and framed her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.

A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people living in abject destitution, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed smear campaign to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, pits the resourceful residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, of course.

There is little especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding appetite for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies setting his always poor beloved underdog against corporate bosses, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes demise of elite figures.

The Catharsis That Changes Nothing

However, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time lawmakers react to a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. And yet the news demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating a contradictory message.

In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of predominantly uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.

A More Pointed Edge in 2025

Although 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more specific, and apparently more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals live by different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.

Key Outliers

Some films diverge, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined 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 reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid