This Year's Biggest Movies Told Us to Eat the Rich Again. We Still Refuse to Listen.
A recurring motif runs through many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends back in time to the days of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to throw the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division as overtly, but its villains enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them into unemployment and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Remarkably, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, naturally.
It is not especially new in a string of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. 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 complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, somehow, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Whenever politicians respond to a tragic gun violence event by blaming graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the headlines makes it obvious every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after a century of history's most popular movies promoting a contradictory message.
Actually, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that hinders meaningful change. Provided with a frequent serving of predominantly happily-ever-after tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they do follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more direct, and seemingly more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people function with different standards, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exceptions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. 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 revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
