A familiar idea permeates many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that goes far back to the time of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people suffering through abject destitution, while using deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity as overtly, but its antagonists enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the resourceful residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Even, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
There is little especially new in a string of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies setting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the defusing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
Nevertheless, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion elected officials react to a public shooting event by blaming graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. Still the daily reports reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a frequent serving of mostly happily-ever-after tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like ethical parables, suggesting that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any corrupt individuals among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more targeted, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory 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, greedy, hateful rich individuals were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, possibly since it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exceptions
There are exceptions, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished 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 antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
