A familiar idea courses through numerous 2025's popular films. It's an idea that goes all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to defame Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to trap the heroes into a monster-filled arena to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, sets the tough residents of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish gleaming towers floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — to make money, of course.
It is not particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding appetite for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his always poor Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, bosses, and clueless rich men. From 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 rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is at odds with core morality, and applaud the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
And yet, somehow, we never actually eating the rich. On each occasion politicians respond to a tragic gun violence event by blaming graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the daily reports demonstrates regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively equate riches with intelligence and value to society, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies promoting the reverse.
If anything, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that impedes real-world action. Given a frequent serving of largely uplifting fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater content about good conquering evil. These stories are like cautionary fables, suggesting that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any corrupt individuals among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they indeed follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and apparently more lethal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, 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, selfish, cruel wealthy people were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car finale, perhaps because it’s become so clear that the wealthy live by a separate justice system, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exceptions
A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. 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 thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
