2025's Biggest Movies Instructed Us to Eat the Rich Yet Again. We Still Refuse to Listen.
An age-old idea courses through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that goes all the way back to the era of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to smear Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering tens of millions to throw the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people living in extreme hardship, while using AI forgeries and a well-honed smear campaign to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the scrappy residents of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger worldwide catastrophe — to make money, of course.
It is not especially new in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled desire for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept dates back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor Little Tramp character against tycoons, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and applaud the defusing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Changes Nothing
However, for some reason, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Every time politicians follow a new mass shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. But the news reveals every single day that a alarming number of Americans innately equate riches with competence and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies promoting the opposite.
If anything, it seems like the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that hinders meaningful change. Given a steady diet of mostly triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will weed out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more specific, and observably more violent. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Outliers
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
