A familiar theme permeates many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that stretches back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending vast sums to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Film Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in lavish sky-high mansions floating overhead. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, naturally.
It is not particularly surprising in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against tycoons, industrialists, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. On each occasion lawmakers follow a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — surely American society would not continue to worship billionaires. But the daily reports reveals regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately link affluence to intelligence and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders meaningful change. Provided with a steady diet of largely uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about good conquering evil. These stories are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will identify any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more specific, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, 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 eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people live by different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
