The Year's Biggest Films Told Us to Consume the Wealthy Yet Again. We Yet Aren't Listening.
A recurring motif permeates numerous 2025's popular films. This concept that stretches all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul spending tens of millions to throw the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people living in extreme hardship, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its antagonists live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Interestingly, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, of course.
It is not particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his always poor beloved underdog against corporate bosses, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never actually eating the rich. Every time lawmakers follow a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the headlines reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after decades of history's most popular movies conveying a contradictory message.
In fact, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Offered a frequent serving of mostly triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will root out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
