The Year's Top-Grossing Films Told Us to Eat the Rich Yet Again. We Continue to Refuse to Listen.
A familiar motif runs through numerous 2025's popular films. This notion that goes far back to the days of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to defame Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through desperate poverty, while using deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, contrasts the resourceful residents of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Even, the zany humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to cause worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, naturally.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Outlet That Alters Little
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion elected officials respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. But the headlines reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans innately associate wealth with competence and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.
If anything, it appears that the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders meaningful change. Provided with a steady diet of mostly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and observably more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory these days 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, selfish, cruel affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, perhaps because it’s become so clear that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
