The Year's Top-Grossing Movies Told Us to Consume the Wealthy Yet Again. We Yet Aren't Listening.
A recurring theme runs through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that stretches far back to the days of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro squandering tens of millions to throw the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Film Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its villains enjoy clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, contrasts the tough residents of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — to make money, naturally.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept dates back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion politicians respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. But the daily reports demonstrates regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies communicating a contradictory message.
In fact, it appears that the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of largely triumphant stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film satisfied about justice being served. These movies are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more direct, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exclusions
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the virtual grid, 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 wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
