How we lost our appetite for eat-the-rich satire

It seems as if nobody can decide who should shoulder most of the blame for the recent box office flop of Digger.

Was it the ousted Warner Bros film executives Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy, whose love of big-budget auteur cinema usually came with a hefty price tag? Or was it the marketing team, who were responsible for hiding the movie’s biggest swing from all trailers, ensuring many viewers would be left alienated from its early meta-reveal onwards?

The truthful answer is that the film’s fate was sealed long before anybody could point fingers over its failure. In the past year it’s become clear that audiences have grown tired of the worn-out cinematic trend Digger is a part of: the eat-the-rich satire.

There was a brief moment when audiences couldn’t get enough movie takedowns of the uber-wealthy, with the breakout success of Parasite inspiring Hollywood to seize upon its class-conscious themes and drag them into the west. The sustained fallout from the Covid pandemic brought issues of wealth inequality further into the spotlight, and titles as varied as Glass Onion, Saltburn, Triangle of Sadness and The Menu all spoke to the zeitgeist with their distinct, controversial takedowns of the 1%.

On the small screen, Succession and The White Lotus rapidly increased their audiences after acclaimed first seasons, thanks to the promise of darkly comic social commentary skewering those at the top of the food chain. Audiences were more than ready to eat the rich, but their appetites were satiated long before Hollywood had even considered switching up the menu.

Digger is the most high-profile casualty of this trend running its course, with some reports predicting it could lose a staggering $250m (£190m) during its cinema run. The divisive reviews and audience reactions are easy to blame, but perhaps it would have been better received had audiences not grown exhausted by constant cinematic reminders about how much they’ve been screwed over by the rich and powerful.

The theme hasn’t grown any less urgent, but interest in movies that hold a cracked mirror up to this reality has waned. Already this year, two action-revenge movies pitting lower-class protagonists against the super-rich in fights to the death – Ready or Not 2 and They Will Kill You – belly-flopped at the box office, and even arthouse audiences seem to be exhausted by this brand of topical satire, if receipts for Rosebush Pruning and I Love Boosters are anything to go by.

On the small screen, the return of anthology series Beef, an awards sensation and streaming hit in its first run, failed to register as it pivoted to this familiar class satire, barely cracking Netflix’s daily top 10 before disappearing entirely.

Later this week, Romain Gavras’s Sacrifice will debut on Netflix with no fanfare, more than a year after its hotly anticipated festival premiere landed with a thud. It’s a tale of shallow but self-righteous celebrities at a fundraising gala infiltrated by violent activists, boasting an A-list cast including Chris Evans, Anya Taylor-Joy and John Malkovich. It echoes many of the previously mentioned titles’ themes about the tension between the wealthy and their commitment to political causes. And even with its starry ensemble and clear cultural relevance, it took several months to find a distributor, and this paragraph may be the first you’re hearing of it.

The strangest thing about the death of this trend in movies is that many of its ideas are finding more ground in the mainstream. Even the most vanilla tax on higher earners is supported by 75% of Britons, according to YouGov, and a clear majority of 60% in the US. People are becoming more openly critical of the super-wealthy, so it is strange that pop culture taking aim at their unsustainable lifestyles is being met with fatigue.

We’re living through a time when the world’s richest man is also one of the most widely disliked, and the real-estate mogul US president keeps hitting new lows in approval ratings. Despite the not-so-secret allegiances of some studio heads – Skydance CEO David Ellison is an enthusiastic Trump backer – Hollywood creatives are aware of how detested among the public these figures are beyond their bases, and studios haven’t been shy in greenlighting movies with a satirical disdain for everything they represent, politically and culturally. Why has it stopped striking a chord?

The most obvious explanation is pure exhaustion. Doomscrolling has become a daily activity for millions, so why would anybody need to part with their money to see a movie satirising the people responsible for the state of the world when they could get sharper, more topical gags on their timeline for free?

In trying to speak to the times without the responsibility of reacting to more specific headlines, the eat-the-rich movie often winds up preaching the obvious, late to the joke even if the sentiment remains relevant. It’s the Stewart Lee routine about political satire – “Was it funny? No, but I agreed the fuck out of it” – blown up to blockbuster scale, and nobody is spending their hard-earned cash to politely nod along to a movie they should be laughing at.

The irony of Digger being the final movie released by Warner Bros as an independent studio hasn’t been lost, with its theme of billionaires trying to control the narrative foreshadowing the arrival of a new studio owner with an interest in appeasing the president.

We might become nostalgic for this brand of movie very quickly if the worst assumptions about Ellison’s studio takeover come true, as well as being thankful that a movie of this kind could have ever been greenlit at this level. Unfortunately, no passage of time will make this and every other late-stage capitalism satire become laugh-out-loud funny.