The Year's Biggest Films Instructed Us to Eat the Rich Once More. We Yet Aren't Listening.
A recurring idea runs through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that goes back in time to the days of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro investing tens of millions to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Film Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people enduring abject destitution, while using AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains live in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the resourceful residents of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions above the clouds. Remarkably, the lighthearted farcical update of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.
It is not especially new in a string of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme dates back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against corporate bosses, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is contrary to basic human values, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Alters Little
However, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Every time politicians follow a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the daily reports reveals regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously equate riches with smartness and social worth, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting a contradictory message.
In fact, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that hinders meaningful change. Given a frequent serving of largely uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will root out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson 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, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people live by different standards, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exclusions
There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid