The Year's Top-Grossing Movies Told Us to Eat the Rich Once More. We Continue to Aren't Listening.
A familiar theme permeates many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that goes far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people living in desperate poverty, while using deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality quite that directly, but its villains reside in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, contrasts the resourceful people of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish gleaming towers floating overhead. Remarkably, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.
It is not particularly surprising in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged desire for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Alters Little
And yet, somehow, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time elected officials react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. Still the news demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with competence and social worth, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it appears that the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a steady diet of mostly uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will root out any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and observably more lethal. It’s rarely enough nowadays 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 oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising 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 apparent that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exceptions
A few stories differ, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
