A familiar theme permeates a host of 2025's popular films. This concept that goes back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people living in abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity quite that directly, but its antagonists enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the zany farcical update of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about worldwide catastrophe — to make money, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that rich people have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the early days of film, with early comedies setting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
However, inexplicably, we never actually consuming the elite. Every time lawmakers follow a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals every single day that a alarming number of Americans innately link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after decades of history's most popular 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 impedes substantive reform. Provided with a steady diet of largely triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These films are like ethical parables, pretending that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will identify any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more direct, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten 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 national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
