This Year's Most Popular Films Urged Us to Eat the Rich Once More. We Yet Ignore the Message.

A recurring motif courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches back in time to the era of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, solely for their own profit.

A Lineage of Film Wealth Disparity

In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity quite that directly, but its antagonists live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the zany farcical update of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — to make money, of course.

There is little especially new in a string of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against fat cats, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.

The Catharsis That Changes Nothing

And yet, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. Whenever politicians react to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — certainly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the news demonstrates regularly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to intelligence and importance, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.

In fact, it appears that the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that hinders real-world action. Given a frequent serving of largely uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film content about right prevailing. These movies are like cautionary fables, suggesting that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will root out any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.

A Sharper Tone in 2025

Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so clear that the wealthy function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out."

The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.

Significant Exceptions

A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid