This Year's Biggest Movies Instructed Us to Consume the Wealthy Once More. We Still Ignore the Message.

A familiar idea courses through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that goes far back to the days of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending vast sums to trap the heroes into a prehistoric death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.

A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy

In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people suffering through abject destitution, while using digital impersonations and a powerful propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality as overtly, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the tough people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.

There’s nothing especially new in a string of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.

The Release That Changes Nothing

And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Whenever elected officials follow a new mass shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. But the news reveals regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and importance, even after decades of history's most popular movies conveying the opposite.

If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of largely triumphant fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away satisfied about good conquering evil. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.

A More Pointed Tone in 2025

Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more direct, and seemingly more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).

"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people function with different standards, and are highly probable to buy their way out."

The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.

Key Outliers

Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, where he’s clearly 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 exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid