A recurring idea courses through many of 2025's popular films. It's an idea that goes back in time to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending vast sums to throw the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the defusing, defeat, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time elected officials follow a public shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. And yet the news reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans innately link affluence to competence and social worth, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it appears that the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that gets in the way of meaningful change. Offered a steady diet of mostly happily-ever-after fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more specific, and seemingly more fatal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so clear that rich people live by different standards, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exceptions
There are exceptions, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
