A familiar theme courses through a host of 2025's popular films. This concept that stretches all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people living in extreme hardship, while using digital impersonations and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity quite that directly, but its antagonists live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the tough residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany farcical update of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.
It is not inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding desire 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 beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, 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 revised the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion elected officials react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and importance, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes substantive reform. Given a steady diet of largely triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about good conquering evil. These movies are like ethical parables, implying that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era 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 exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy function with a separate justice system, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exceptions
There are exceptions, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up 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 transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
