The Year's Biggest Movies Told Us to Eat the Rich Again. We Still Aren't Listening.
A familiar idea courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists enjoy obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them out of jobs and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Interestingly, the zany humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to cause worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a string of movies presupposing that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged desire for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, 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 revised the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is contrary to fundamental decency, and celebrate the defusing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
However, for some reason, we never actually consuming the elite. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a new mass shooting event by blaming violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the news makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after decades of history's most popular movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Provided with a steady diet of mostly happily-ever-after tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like ethical parables, suggesting that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, 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, greedy, hateful wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, possibly since it’s become so obvious that rich people live by a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the end of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exclusions
There are exceptions, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. 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 culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
