This Year's Top-Grossing Movies Instructed Us to Eat the Rich Yet Again. We Yet Aren't Listening.
A recurring theme permeates many of 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches back in time to the era of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing vast sums to throw the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people living in desperate poverty, while using deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, contrasts the resourceful residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish gleaming towers floating overhead. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme dates back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
However, for some reason, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Every time elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by blaming graphic media, I feel exasperated, 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 — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. But the daily reports makes it obvious regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies conveying the reverse.
In fact, it seems like the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of mostly uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about good conquering evil. These films are like ethical parables, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more targeted, and seemingly more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so clear that rich people live by different standards, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Exceptions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
