A familiar motif runs through many of 2025's popular films. It's an idea that goes far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his immense fortune to defame Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering tens of millions to trap the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a sophisticated media apparatus to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its evil characters enjoy conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, pits the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Even, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to cause worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his always poor Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is at odds with core morality, and exalt the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
However, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Whenever lawmakers follow a public shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious regularly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting the reverse.
If anything, it seems like the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders meaningful change. Provided with a steady diet of mostly triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about good conquering evil. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will root out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they do follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more direct, and seemingly more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car finale, perhaps because it’s become so clear that affluent individuals operate under different standards, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid