This Year's Biggest Blockbusters Urged Us to Eat the Rich Again. We Continue to Ignore the Message.
A recurring theme courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches far back to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro investing vast sums to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful propaganda machine to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division as overtly, but its evil characters reside in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the scrappy residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Interestingly, the zany humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against corporate bosses, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. From 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 greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is contrary to core morality, and applaud the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Alters Little
However, for some reason, we never actually eating the rich. Whenever politicians follow a new mass shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously link affluence to intelligence and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies conveying a contradictory message.
Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that impedes substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of predominantly happily-ever-after fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about good conquering evil. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they do follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more specific, and apparently more violent. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car ending, possibly since it’s become so clear that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined 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 reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
