2025's Most Popular Movies Urged Us to Eat the Rich Again. We Yet Refuse to Listen.

A recurring theme runs through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that stretches back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources 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 investing vast sums to trap the heroes into a prehistoric death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.

A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people living in desperate poverty, while employing digital impersonations and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gleaming towers floating overhead. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to cause worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, of course.

There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme dates back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against fat cats, bosses, 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 the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is at odds with fundamental decency, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.

The Outlet That Fails to Transform

Nevertheless, somehow, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Every time lawmakers follow a tragic gun violence event by faulting popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the daily reports makes it obvious constantly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to intelligence and importance, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies promoting the opposite.

In fact, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that impedes substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of largely uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.

An Angrier Tone in 2025

Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more direct, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that rich people function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to buy their way out."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.

Notable Exclusions

Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled 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 reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid