This Year's Biggest Blockbusters Urged Us to Eat the Rich Again. We Still Refuse to Listen.
A familiar theme runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people living in desperate poverty, while using AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality as overtly, but its villains reside in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, contrasts the resourceful residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent sky-high mansions in the sky. Even, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his always poor Little Tramp character 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 a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is at odds with basic human values, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians react to a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. Still the news demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and importance, even after a century of history's most popular movies promoting the reverse.
In fact, it appears that the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes real-world action. Offered a steady diet of predominantly uplifting fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more specific, and observably more violent. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, 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, greedy, hateful rich individuals were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Outliers
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the digital realm, 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 redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
