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An age-old theme permeates a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that stretches back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to throw the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.

A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare

In *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a rich antagonist running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people living in abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful propaganda machine to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division quite that directly, but its villains enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, pits the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit lavish gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.

There’s nothing particularly surprising in a series of movies presupposing that the affluent have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme goes back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, bosses, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s 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 replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.

The Catharsis That Changes Nothing

Nevertheless, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers respond to a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and importance, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.

Actually, it seems like the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a frequent serving of predominantly happily-ever-after stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.

An Angrier Edge in 2025

Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more direct, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people be taught a 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, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, possibly since it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.

Significant Outliers

A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid