This Year's Top-Grossing Blockbusters Told Us to Eat the Rich Once More. We Still Aren't Listening.

An age-old idea runs through many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul spending vast sums to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and framed her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.

A Tradition of Film Elite Villainy

In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them from their homes and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.

There’s nothing especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, 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 a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is contrary to basic human values, and applaud the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.

The Release That Fails to Transform

And yet, inexplicably, we never actually eating the rich. Whenever lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. Still the news demonstrates regularly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and value to society, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.

Actually, it appears that the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of mostly uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away feeling good about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.

An Angrier Edge in 2025

But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more targeted, and apparently more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, possibly since it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to buy their way out."

The "behind bars" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.

Significant Exclusions

A few stories differ, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind 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 reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid