This Year's Biggest Blockbusters Instructed Us to Eat the Rich Yet Again. We Continue to Refuse to Listen.

A familiar idea permeates numerous 2025's popular films. This notion which extends far back to the time of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his vast wealth to defame Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul squandering tens of millions to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and framed her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.

A Tradition of Cinematic Elite Villainy

In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity as overtly, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, pits the tough inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, of course.

There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.

The Catharsis That Fails to Transform

And yet, for some reason, we never actually consuming the elite. Whenever politicians react to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — surely American society would not continue to revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates regularly that a significant portion of Americans innately link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.

In fact, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes substantive reform. Given a regular dose of mostly happily-ever-after stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away feeling good about justice being served. These movies are like cautionary fables, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.

A Sharper Message in 2025

Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they do follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more violent. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, 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 rich individuals were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy function with a separate justice system, and are highly probable to buy their way out."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to perish at the final act of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.

Significant Outliers

A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. 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