The Year's Top-Grossing Blockbusters Instructed Us to Eat the Rich Again. We Still Aren't Listening.

A familiar theme runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends far back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing vast sums to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.

A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people suffering through extreme hardship, while using AI forgeries and a well-honed propaganda machine to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division quite that directly, but its antagonists enjoy obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, contrasts the resourceful inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, naturally.

It is not inherently notable in a run of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding desire for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.

The Catharsis That Alters Little

However, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Whenever politicians respond to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. But the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and value to society, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies conveying a contradictory message.

In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Provided with a steady diet of predominantly happily-ever-after fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about good conquering evil. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.

An Angrier Message in 2025

Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more specific, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals operate under a separate justice system, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.

Key Exceptions

Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid