2025's Top-Grossing Films Told Us to Consume the Wealthy Again. We Yet Aren't Listening.
A familiar motif permeates a host of 2025's popular films. It's an idea which extends far back to the time of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to smear Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to trap the heroes into a monster-filled arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a sophisticated media apparatus to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, pits the tough people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in opulent sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously link affluence to competence and social worth, even after decades of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it seems like the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that impedes substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of mostly triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about justice being served. These movies are like ethical parables, pretending that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any corrupt individuals among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more direct, and seemingly more violent. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy function with different standards, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Outliers
Some films diverge, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
