This Year's Most Popular Blockbusters Urged Us to Eat the Rich Yet Again. We Continue to Refuse to Listen.
A familiar theme permeates many of 2025's popular films. This notion which extends all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while using deepfakes and a sophisticated propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, contrasts the tough people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, of course.
It is not especially new in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the defusing, defeat, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
And yet, inexplicably, we never actually eating the rich. Whenever elected officials respond to a new mass shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — 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. And yet the headlines demonstrates regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously equate riches with intelligence and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.
In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes real-world action. Offered a steady diet of largely uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about good conquering evil. These films are like cautionary fables, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and seemingly more violent. It is seldom sufficient 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 exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people function with different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. 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 exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
