A familiar theme courses through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that stretches back in time to the era of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing tens of millions to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people living in desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a sophisticated smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its villains reside in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.
There is little inherently notable in a series of movies presupposing that rich people have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and applaud the defusing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never actually eating the rich. Every time elected officials react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. But the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively equate riches with smartness and value to society, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies promoting the reverse.
Actually, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that gets in the way of meaningful change. Offered a steady diet of largely triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, 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, implying that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and seemingly more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, 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 affluent villains were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, possibly since it’s become so apparent that the wealthy live by a separate justice system, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
