A recurring idea courses through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion which extends back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul investing vast sums to throw the heroes into a monster-filled arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a sophisticated media apparatus to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity quite that directly, but its evil characters reside in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to bring about global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
It is not especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, 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 updated the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Release That Alters Little
Nevertheless, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Whenever elected officials respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. Still the headlines demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after decades of history's most popular movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it looks as though the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that hinders real-world action. Given a steady diet of largely uplifting tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away feeling good about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, suggesting that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they indeed follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more direct, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
