2025's Biggest Blockbusters Instructed Us to Eat the Rich Again. We Still Aren't Listening.

A familiar motif permeates a host of 2025's popular films. It's an idea that stretches all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to defame Earth's superhero icon while manipulating 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 danger zone to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.

A Tradition of Cinematic Class Warfare

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people suffering through abject destitution, while using digital impersonations and a sophisticated propaganda machine to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight economic inequality quite that directly, but its villains enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the resourceful residents of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Remarkably, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to bring about planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.

There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme goes back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.

The Outlet That Changes Nothing

And yet, somehow, we never actually eating the rich. Every time lawmakers react to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the daily reports reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously link affluence to competence and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating a contradictory message.

Actually, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders real-world action. Offered a regular dose of predominantly happily-ever-after fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.

A More Pointed Edge in 2025

Although 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they do follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more specific, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, 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 mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car ending, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to negotiate their release."

The "behind bars" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.

Significant Exclusions

Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid