The Year's Top-Grossing Movies Instructed Us to Eat the Rich Yet Again. We Still Refuse to Listen.
A familiar idea courses through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that stretches far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his immense fortune to defame Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists live in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to cause global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against tycoons, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is at odds with fundamental decency, and applaud the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never get around to eating the rich. Whenever lawmakers respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.
In fact, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that impedes substantive reform. Given a steady diet of largely triumphant stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These movies are like cautionary fables, implying that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will root out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough in the current era 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 exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car finale, likely due to it’s become so clear that the wealthy live by different standards, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exclusions
Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
