The Year's Biggest Blockbusters Instructed Us to Eat the Rich Yet Again. We Continue to Refuse to Listen.

A familiar motif courses through many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, all for their own profit.

A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people suffering through abject destitution, while employing deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the resourceful residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.

There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies presupposing that rich people have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged desire for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme goes back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.

The Release That Alters Little

And yet, somehow, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Every time politicians respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious constantly that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies conveying a contradictory message.

In fact, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a steady diet of largely uplifting fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about justice being served. These films are like ethical parables, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will root out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.

A Sharper Tone in 2025

Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car finale, possibly since it’s become so obvious that the wealthy function with different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."

The "behind bars" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.

Significant Exclusions

There are exceptions, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid

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The Year's Biggest Blockbusters Instructed Us to Eat the Rich Yet Again. We Continue to Refuse to Listen.

A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare

The Release That Alters Little

A Sharper Tone in 2025

Significant Exclusions

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