This Year's Top-Grossing Blockbusters Instructed Us to Eat the Rich Once More. We Still Refuse to Listen.

A recurring motif runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends far back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to defame Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul investing tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their own profit.

A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity

In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while using deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to cause global armageddon — to make money, of course.

There’s nothing inherently notable in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to basic human values, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.

The Release That Alters Little

However, for some reason, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Whenever elected officials respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the headlines demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously equate riches with intelligence and importance, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies conveying the reverse.

In fact, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of mostly uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about good conquering evil. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.

A More Pointed Message in 2025

Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more direct, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough in the current era 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, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car finale, possibly since it’s become so obvious that rich people function with different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."

The "off to face justice" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to perish at the final act of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.

Significant Exclusions

A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid