🔗 Share this article 2025's Top-Grossing Films Told Us to Consume the Wealthy Yet Again. We Still Refuse to Listen. A recurring motif permeates numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept which extends back in time to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and framed her for murder, all for their financial benefit. A Legacy of On-Screen Elite Villainy In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people suffering through extreme hardship, while using AI forgeries and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity as overtly, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the resourceful people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — to make money, naturally. It is not especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against fat cats, authority figures, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is at odds with basic human values, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of elite figures. The Release That Fails to Transform And yet, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Every time lawmakers react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. Still the daily reports reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans innately link affluence to smartness and value to society, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite. Actually, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that impedes substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of mostly happily-ever-after tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like cautionary fables, implying that society is just, and that determined protagonists will identify any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort. A More Pointed Message in 2025 Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on live TV (*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 driven away in cuffs ending, possibly since it’s become so apparent that the wealthy function with a separate justice system, and are very likely to negotiate their release." The "behind bars" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways. Notable Exceptions Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid