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An age-old theme courses through many of 2025's popular films. This concept that goes far back to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.

A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people living in abject destitution, while employing deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality as overtly, but its evil characters reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the tough inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — to make money, of course.

There is little especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise 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 incompatible with basic human values, and exalt the defusing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.

The Release That Fails to Transform

Nevertheless, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion politicians respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society would not continue to worship billionaires. Still the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating a contradictory message.

If anything, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich 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 mostly uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These movies are like cautionary fables, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will identify any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.

An Angrier Tone in 2025

Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more specific, and seemingly more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, possibly since it’s become so obvious that the wealthy function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to buy their way out."

The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to perish at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.

Significant Exclusions

Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid