This Year's Biggest Blockbusters Told Us to Consume the Wealthy Again. We Still Refuse to Listen.
A familiar motif permeates many of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his immense fortune to defame Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul investing vast sums to trap the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and framed her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Film Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people living in desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight economic inequality quite that directly, but its antagonists live in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them from their homes and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the resourceful residents of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to cause worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, needless to say.
There is little inherently notable in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against fat cats, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is contrary to fundamental decency, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Alters Little
However, somehow, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time politicians react to a public shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — surely American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the news reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting a contradictory message.
Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that impedes meaningful change. Provided with a regular dose of mostly uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about justice being served. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more targeted, and apparently more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
