The Year's Biggest Films Instructed Us to Eat the Rich Yet Again. We Still Refuse to Listen.
An age-old motif permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes far back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people living in abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about economic inequality quite that directly, but its villains enjoy conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, pits the resourceful people of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
It is not particularly surprising in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, authority figures, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, somehow, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time politicians react to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately link affluence to smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies promoting the opposite.
Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Provided with a regular dose of largely uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These stories are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they indeed follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more targeted, and seemingly more violent. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals function with a separate justice system, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
