This Year's Most Popular Films Told Us to Eat the Rich Yet Again. We Still Ignore the Message.
An age-old theme runs through many of 2025's popular films. It's an idea which extends far back to the time of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated smear campaign to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its villains reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, sets the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in lavish gleaming towers floating overhead. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme dates back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s 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 filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is at odds with basic human values, and exalt the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Alters Little
However, inexplicably, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion politicians respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the headlines demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders meaningful change. Given a steady diet of largely happily-ever-after tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film satisfied about good conquering evil. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they do follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more direct, and seemingly more lethal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals operate under a separate justice system, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Outliers
Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the digital realm, where he’s clearly 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 wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
