🔗 Share this article This Year's Biggest Movies Instructed Us to Consume the Wealthy Once More. We Continue to Aren't Listening. A recurring motif permeates many of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes back in time to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul squandering vast sums to trap the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit. A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity quite that directly, but its antagonists live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, contrasts the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — to make money, needless to say. There’s nothing particularly surprising in a series of movies presupposing that the affluent have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, industrialists, 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 revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is contrary to basic human values, and applaud the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful. The Outlet That Alters Little However, inexplicably, we never actually eating the rich. Whenever politicians respond to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the headlines makes it obvious every single day that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously equate riches with competence and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse. If anything, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that hinders substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of predominantly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These stories are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps. A Sharper Edge in 2025 Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more specific, and seemingly more fatal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*). "Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so clear that the wealthy live by different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out." The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways. Key Exceptions Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid