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A recurring motif runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to smear Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul squandering a fortune to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.

A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity as overtly, but its antagonists reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, pits the resourceful people of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.

There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled desire for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, bosses, 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 updated that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is at odds with core morality, and applaud the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.

The Release That Fails to Transform

And yet, for some reason, we never get around to eating the rich. Every time lawmakers respond to a new mass shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the news reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously equate riches with competence and social worth, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.

If anything, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Offered a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater content about good conquering evil. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.

An Angrier Tone in 2025

Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more targeted, and apparently more violent. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people learn a useful 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, greedy, hateful rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).

"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people live by a separate justice system, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."

The "off to face justice" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.

Significant Exceptions

Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. 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 thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid