This Year's Biggest Movies Urged Us to Eat the Rich Once More. We Still Ignore the Message.

An age-old idea permeates many of 2025's popular films. It's an idea that stretches back in time to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to cast the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.

A Tradition 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 desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed media apparatus to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its villains live in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, contrasts the tough people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in extravagant sky-high mansions above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — to make money, naturally.

It is not particularly surprising in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against fat cats, bosses, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to fundamental decency, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.

The Release That Changes Nothing

However, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians follow a public shooting event by blaming graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. Still the headlines demonstrates regularly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies conveying the reverse.

Actually, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders substantive reform. Given a regular dose of mostly uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film satisfied about good conquering evil. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will root out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.

An Angrier Message in 2025

Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they do follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more specific, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, 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 rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car finale, possibly since it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by different standards, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."

The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.

Key Exceptions

A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined 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 wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid