The Year's Biggest Movies Told Us to Eat the Rich Again. We Still Aren't Listening.
A recurring theme runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul squandering tens of millions to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people living in abject destitution, while employing deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, pits the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, naturally.
There is little especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
However, for some reason, we never actually consuming the elite. Every time politicians follow a new mass shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious every single day that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously link affluence to intelligence and importance, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting the reverse.
Actually, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that gets in the way of meaningful change. Provided with a regular dose of mostly triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like ethical parables, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more specific, and apparently more lethal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming 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 apparent that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exclusions
There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the computer world, 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 wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
