The Year's Top-Grossing Movies Instructed Us to Consume the Wealthy Yet Again. We Yet Ignore the Message.

A recurring motif permeates a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that stretches far back to the time of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, purely for their own profit.

A Legacy of Film Wealth Disparity

In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people living in abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, sets the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to bring about planetary doom — to make money, naturally.

It is not particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged desire for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his always poor Little Tramp character against tycoons, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.

The Catharsis That Changes Nothing

However, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Every time lawmakers follow a public shooting event by faulting graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting a contradictory message.

In fact, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a frequent serving of predominantly triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film feeling good about good conquering evil. These movies are like ethical parables, pretending that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.

An Angrier Tone in 2025

Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more direct, and observably more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era 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 oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, possibly since it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals function with a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."

The "off to face justice" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.

Key Exclusions

Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. 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 revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid