🔗 Share this article The Year's Top-Grossing Films Told Us to Eat the Rich Yet Again. We Still Refuse to Listen. An age-old idea permeates many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that stretches back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his vast wealth to smear Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their financial benefit. A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through abject destitution, while employing digital impersonations and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them from their homes and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy farcical update of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, needless to say. There is little especially new in a series of movies presupposing that the affluent have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting 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 greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful. The Catharsis That Fails to Transform However, for some reason, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians respond to a tragic gun violence event by faulting graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. But the news reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with competence and social worth, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting the opposite. In fact, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that impedes meaningful change. Offered a frequent serving of mostly happily-ever-after tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort. A More Pointed Tone in 2025 But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and seemingly more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, 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 wealthy people were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*). "Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom." The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways. Significant Exceptions A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid