The Year's Top-Grossing Blockbusters Told Us to Eat the Rich Yet Again. We Continue to Refuse to Listen.
A recurring idea courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches back in time to the era of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Film Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring extreme hardship, while employing deepfakes and a powerful propaganda machine to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its antagonists live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, pits the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Interestingly, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, of course.
It is not especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor beloved underdog against fat cats, authority figures, and clueless rich men. 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 exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is contrary to fundamental decency, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, 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 public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the headlines makes it obvious regularly that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after decades of history's most popular movies communicating a contradictory message.
In fact, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about good conquering evil. These movies are like cautionary fables, suggesting that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will identify any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, possibly since it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals live by different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exclusions
There are exceptions, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the virtual grid, teasing that he is 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 thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
