This Year's Most Popular Movies Instructed Us to Eat the Rich Again. We Yet Refuse to Listen.

A recurring theme runs through many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes far back to the era of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending vast sums to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.

A Tradition of Cinematic Elite Villainy

In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, pits the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in opulent sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.

There is little especially new in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is contrary to fundamental decency, and celebrate the defusing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.

The Release That Changes Nothing

And yet, for some reason, we never actually consuming the elite. Every time elected officials follow a public shooting event by blaming violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the daily reports reveals regularly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously link affluence to competence and importance, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies promoting a contradictory message.

Actually, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders meaningful change. Given a frequent serving of predominantly happily-ever-after tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, suggesting that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.

A Sharper Message in 2025

But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more specific, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals live by a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to perish at the final act of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.

Notable Exceptions

Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid