The Year's Top-Grossing Blockbusters Told Us to Eat the Rich Once More. We Continue to Aren't Listening.
An age-old theme runs through a host of 2025's popular films. It's an idea that goes back in time to the days of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to defame Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its villains enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, contrasts the tough people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the lighthearted humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, naturally.
It is not especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers follow a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the headlines makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies promoting the opposite.
Actually, it appears that the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that hinders real-world action. Provided with a steady diet of predominantly triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more direct, 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 be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, possibly since it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by a separate justice system, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid