An age-old idea permeates numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion which extends all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his immense fortune to smear Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul squandering vast sums to trap the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through extreme hardship, while using digital impersonations and a powerful propaganda machine to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists reside in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them out of jobs and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the resourceful inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in extravagant sky-high mansions above the clouds. Remarkably, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to cause worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, needless to say.
It is not especially new in a string of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. From 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 rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is contrary to core morality, and exalt the defusing, downfall, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, somehow, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by blaming 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 — undoubtedly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Provided with a steady diet of largely uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about good conquering evil. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will root out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more targeted, and apparently more fatal. It’s rarely enough nowadays 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, selfish, cruel affluent villains were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, possibly since it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the digital realm, 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 transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
