2025's Top-Grossing Films Told Us to Consume the Wealthy Yet Again. We Continue to Ignore the Message.
A familiar motif permeates a host of 2025's popular films. This notion which extends far back to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his enormous resources to defame Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed propaganda machine to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about economic inequality as overtly, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the resourceful inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions floating overhead. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, of course.
It is not particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme dates back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his always poor beloved underdog against fat cats, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning 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 whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Alters Little
Nevertheless, somehow, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials follow a tragic gun violence event by blaming popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society would not continue to worship billionaires. Still the news reveals constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies promoting a contradictory message.
In fact, it seems like the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that impedes meaningful change. Provided with a frequent serving of mostly happily-ever-after fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more specific, and seemingly more lethal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson 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 eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people function with a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Outliers
Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished 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 transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
