An age-old motif permeates many of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that goes far back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing tens of millions to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity as overtly, but its antagonists enjoy conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, contrasts the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Interestingly, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that the wealthy have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is at odds with fundamental decency, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
However, for some reason, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious constantly that a alarming number of Americans innately equate riches with smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies conveying the reverse.
If anything, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that hinders substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of largely happily-ever-after tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about justice being served. These movies are like ethical parables, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more specific, and observably more lethal. It’s rarely enough nowadays 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, greedy, hateful affluent villains were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that the wealthy operate under different standards, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
