The Year's Top-Grossing Blockbusters Urged Us to Eat the Rich Yet Again. We Still Aren't Listening.
An age-old motif permeates numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that goes back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Film Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, of course.
It is not especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding appetite for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against tycoons, bosses, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the defusing, downfall, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, somehow, we never actually eating the rich. On each occasion politicians react to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — surely American society would not continue to worship billionaires. But the news reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with competence and social worth, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.
Actually, it seems like the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that impedes meaningful change. Given a steady diet of predominantly uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away feeling good about good conquering evil. These movies are like cautionary fables, implying that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they do follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more specific, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so clear that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exceptions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
