2025's Biggest Movies Urged Us to Eat the Rich Yet Again. We Continue to Refuse to Listen.
An age-old theme runs through numerous 2025's popular films. This concept which extends all the way back to the era of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul spending vast sums to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and framed her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its evil characters reside in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to bring about global armageddon — to make money, naturally.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that the affluent have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, 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 revised a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the defusing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Every time politicians respond to a public shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies communicating a contradictory message.
Actually, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a steady diet of predominantly triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away feeling good about justice being served. These movies are like cautionary fables, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more targeted, and seemingly more fatal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, perhaps because it’s become so clear that affluent individuals live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Outliers
Some films diverge, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. 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 unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
