A familiar idea courses through numerous 2025's popular films. It's an idea which extends far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of On-Screen Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality quite that directly, but its antagonists enjoy conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
There is little inherently notable in a string of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with 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 exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is at odds with fundamental decency, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion politicians react to a new mass shooting event by blaming graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. But the news makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously link affluence to competence and value to society, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies conveying the reverse.
If anything, it seems like the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a regular dose of largely happily-ever-after stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away satisfied about justice being served. These stories are like cautionary fables, pretending that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more specific, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, possibly since it’s become so obvious that the wealthy function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the final act of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exclusions
Some films diverge, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. 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 unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid