2025's Top-Grossing Movies Told Us to Eat the Rich Again. We Yet Aren't Listening.
An age-old idea runs through numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends far back to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul squandering tens of millions to throw the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while employing digital impersonations and a sophisticated media apparatus to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity as overtly, but its evil characters enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the resourceful inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent sky-high mansions floating overhead. Even, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, needless to say.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged desire for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is contrary to fundamental decency, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
And yet, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials follow a new mass shooting event by blaming violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans innately associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it seems like the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that impedes real-world action. Offered a steady diet of predominantly happily-ever-after fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about good conquering evil. These stories are like cautionary fables, implying that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more specific, and seemingly more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail finale, possibly since it’s become so apparent that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid