A recurring theme courses through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that goes far back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering a fortune to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while using deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality quite that directly, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing 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 film, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Even, the lighthearted farcical update of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a run of movies presupposing that rich people have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against tycoons, bosses, 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 updated a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is at odds with basic human values, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Fails to Transform
However, somehow, we never get around to eating the rich. Whenever politicians react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. Still the daily reports reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously equate riches with smartness and social worth, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.
If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Provided with a frequent serving of mostly happily-ever-after fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they do follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more specific, and apparently more fatal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, 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, greedy, hateful wealthy people were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car ending, possibly since it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exclusions
Some films diverge, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. 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 revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
