An age-old theme runs through a host of 2025's popular films. This notion that goes far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Film Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful propaganda machine to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its evil characters reside in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, pits the scrappy residents of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a string of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies pitting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against corporate bosses, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Alters Little
However, for some reason, we never get around to eating the rich. Every time elected officials react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — surely American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the news reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans innately link affluence to intelligence and importance, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting a contradictory message.
Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that hinders real-world action. Offered a steady diet of largely uplifting stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away 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 largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more specific, and observably more violent. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, possibly since it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exceptions
Some films diverge, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
