An age-old theme permeates numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion which extends back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to smear Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about wealth disparity as overtly, but its evil characters enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, contrasts the resourceful residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — to make money, naturally.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his always poor Little Tramp character against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, somehow, we never get around to eating the rich. Every time lawmakers respond to a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — surely American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. But the headlines reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.
If anything, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a steady diet of predominantly triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more direct, and seemingly more fatal. It’s rarely enough these days 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, greedy, hateful rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail finale, likely due to it’s become so clear that the wealthy function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
