The Year's Most Popular Films Told Us to Eat the Rich Yet Again. We Still Ignore the Message.
A familiar motif permeates a host of 2025's popular films. This notion that goes back in time to the time of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul spending a fortune to throw the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring extreme hardship, while using deepfakes and a sophisticated smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality quite that directly, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them into unemployment and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Remarkably, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to bring about global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding appetite for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, and clueless rich men. 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 rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Alters Little
And yet, somehow, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time politicians react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating a contradictory message.
If anything, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that hinders substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of largely uplifting tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more specific, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough 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 oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car finale, perhaps because it’s become so clear that the wealthy function with different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to perish at the final act of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exclusions
Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
