2025's Biggest Movies Instructed Us to Eat the Rich Again. We Yet Aren't Listening.
A recurring idea permeates many of 2025's popular films. This concept that stretches all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while using AI forgeries and a sophisticated media apparatus to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity quite that directly, but its antagonists enjoy conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the tough inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in extravagant sky-high mansions floating overhead. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
It is not inherently notable in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his always poor Little Tramp character against tycoons, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
However, somehow, we never get around to eating the rich. Whenever elected officials react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that susceptible — 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. But the headlines demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies promoting a contradictory message.
In fact, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that impedes real-world action. Offered a regular dose of predominantly triumphant tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more targeted, and seemingly more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory 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 subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car finale, likely due to it’s become so clear that rich people function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished 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 redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
