2025's Top-Grossing Movies Told Us to Eat the Rich Once More. We Still Refuse to Listen.
An age-old idea courses through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul spending vast sums to trap the heroes into a monster-filled arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through abject destitution, while employing deepfakes and a sophisticated smear campaign to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity as overtly, but its antagonists reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, pits the tough residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Interestingly, the zany humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, naturally.
There is little inherently notable in a string of movies presupposing that the wealthy have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged desire for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is at odds with core morality, and exalt the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Alters Little
However, for some reason, we never get around to eating the rich. Whenever politicians react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. But the daily reports makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and value to society, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.
If anything, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders real-world action. Offered a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These movies are like cautionary fables, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any corrupt individuals among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they do follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more specific, and seemingly more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car ending, possibly since it’s become so clear that the wealthy operate under different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exclusions
Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
