2025's Top-Grossing Blockbusters Urged Us to Eat the Rich Once More. We Still Aren't Listening.
A recurring motif permeates numerous 2025's popular films. This notion which extends all the way back to the days of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through abject destitution, while using digital impersonations and a well-honed propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists reside in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the resourceful inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Remarkably, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a series of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is contrary to core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Whenever lawmakers react to a public shooting event by blaming violent video games, I roll my eyes, 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 wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the headlines reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously link affluence to competence and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying a contradictory message.
Actually, it seems like the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that hinders real-world action. Provided with a steady diet of predominantly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will root out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and seemingly more violent. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exclusions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends 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* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
