This Year's Biggest Films Urged Us to Eat the Rich Once More. We Still Aren't Listening.
A familiar theme courses through many of 2025's popular films. This notion that stretches far back to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and framed her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while using deepfakes and a powerful propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its antagonists enjoy conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the tough inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in extravagant sky-high mansions above the clouds. Interestingly, the lighthearted humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to cause global armageddon — to make money, needless to say.
It is not particularly surprising in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is incompatible with fundamental decency, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Alters Little
Nevertheless, somehow, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. On each occasion politicians respond to a tragic gun violence event by blaming popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and importance, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of predominantly happily-ever-after tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and seemingly more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful 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, selfish, cruel rich individuals were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail finale, perhaps because it’s become so clear that affluent individuals operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, 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 redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid