🔗 Share this article This Year's Biggest Blockbusters Instructed Us to Consume the Wealthy Yet Again. We Continue to Aren't Listening. An age-old motif courses through numerous 2025's popular films. This notion that goes far back to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit. A Tradition of Film Elite Villainy Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the tough residents of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in opulent sky-high mansions in the sky. Interestingly, the zany farcical update of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, naturally. There is little inherently notable in a string of movies presupposing that rich people have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged desire for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against tycoons, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed 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 presume that riches is at odds with basic human values, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful. The Catharsis That Changes Nothing Nevertheless, somehow, we never actually eating the rich. Every time lawmakers react to a new mass shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports reveals constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting a contradictory message. Actually, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a frequent serving of largely uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps. A More Pointed Tone in 2025 Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more direct, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money 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 eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming 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 buy their way out." The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways. Key Exceptions There are exceptions, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the computer world, teasing that he is 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 revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid