This Year's Biggest Movies Urged Us to Consume the Wealthy Once More. We Continue to Refuse to Listen.
An age-old theme courses through a host of 2025's popular films. This concept which extends far back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his immense fortune to defame Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people living in abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, naturally.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a string of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is at odds with fundamental decency, and applaud the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Release That Alters Little
And yet, for some reason, we never actually eating the rich. Every time elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society would not continue to worship billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately associate wealth with competence and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies conveying a contradictory message.
In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders real-world action. Given a steady diet of mostly happily-ever-after fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about good conquering evil. These movies are like cautionary fables, suggesting that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will identify any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they do follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and apparently more violent. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, 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, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so clear that the wealthy live by different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
