🔗 Share this article 2025's Biggest Blockbusters Urged Us to Eat the Rich Once More. We Still Aren't Listening. An age-old motif courses through numerous 2025's popular films. This concept that goes all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro investing vast sums to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit. A Lineage of On-Screen Class Warfare In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while using deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its villains enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say. There is little particularly surprising in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes demise of elite figures. The Outlet That Fails to Transform However, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Every time politicians react to a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society would not continue to revere billionaires. Still the news reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite. If anything, it appears that the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes meaningful change. Offered a steady diet of largely uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, pretending that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any corrupt individuals among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort. A Sharper Message in 2025 But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they indeed follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more lethal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*). "Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car ending, possibly since it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals operate under different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom." The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways. Key Exceptions Some films diverge, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the digital realm, teasing that he is 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 unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid