This Year's Biggest Blockbusters Urged Us to Eat the Rich Again. We Continue to Aren't Listening.
An age-old idea runs through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that stretches all the way back to the era of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul spending tens of millions to throw the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, all for their own profit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people enduring extreme hardship, while using AI forgeries and a well-honed smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity quite that directly, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the tough people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, needless to say.
It is not inherently notable in a string of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, bosses, 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 refreshed that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to basic human values, and applaud the defusing, downfall, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion elected officials react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of mostly triumphant tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away content about good conquering evil. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will weed out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and seemingly more lethal. It is seldom sufficient 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 subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so clear that affluent individuals operate under their own legal rules, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exclusions
There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. 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 frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
