This Year's Top-Grossing Blockbusters Instructed Us to Eat the Rich Yet Again. We Continue to Aren't Listening.
An age-old idea runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to defame Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Film Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its antagonists enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, sets the scrappy residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Remarkably, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to cause planetary doom — for his own profit, naturally.
There is little inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, bosses, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is at odds with core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, for some reason, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials follow a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the news demonstrates constantly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after decades of history's most popular movies conveying a contradictory message.
If anything, it seems like the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Given a regular dose of largely happily-ever-after stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more specific, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, 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, selfish, cruel affluent villains were eliminated by mythological beasts (*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 point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, possibly since it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals live by different standards, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exclusions
Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid