A recurring theme permeates many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept which extends all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to defame Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people living in desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in lavish gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, naturally.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme dates back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against fat cats, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
However, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time lawmakers follow a new mass shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. Still the headlines makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with competence and importance, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that impedes substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of predominantly happily-ever-after tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will root out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson 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, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, possibly since it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals operate under their own legal rules, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exceptions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
