An age-old motif permeates a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that goes far back to the time of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people enduring abject destitution, while using AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, pits the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, naturally.
There is little especially new in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding appetite for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme goes back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, 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 revised a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers react to a public shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. Still the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.
Actually, it seems like the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that impedes meaningful change. Given a frequent serving of mostly uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These films are like ethical parables, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exclusions
There are exceptions, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
