This Year's Top-Grossing Films Told Us to Take Down the Elite Yet Again. We Still Refuse to Listen.
An age-old motif permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes far back to the days of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, all for their own profit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people living in abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a sophisticated smear campaign to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists reside in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, pits the resourceful inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to cause worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, naturally.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a series of movies taking it as a given that rich people have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged desire for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor Little Tramp character against tycoons, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with 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 greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is at odds with fundamental decency, and exalt the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never actually eating the rich. Whenever politicians follow a public shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. Still the headlines demonstrates constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies communicating a contradictory message.
In fact, it appears that the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a steady diet of largely triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about good conquering evil. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more direct, and seemingly more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in humility, 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, selfish, cruel affluent villains were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, possibly since it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exceptions
Some films diverge, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
