This Year's Top-Grossing Movies Told Us to Eat the Rich Again. We Yet Refuse to Listen.
An age-old theme permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion that stretches far back to the time of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul spending tens of millions to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through desperate poverty, while using AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its villains live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them out of jobs and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the zany humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to cause worldwide catastrophe — to make money, naturally.
It is not especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against corporate bosses, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the defusing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Every time lawmakers follow a new mass shooting event by blaming graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the news reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating a contradictory message.
If anything, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that impedes real-world action. Given a regular dose of mostly uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like ethical parables, implying that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, perhaps because it’s become so clear that rich people live by different standards, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
