An age-old idea courses through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that goes far back to the era of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people enduring extreme hardship, while using deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division as overtly, but its evil characters live in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the zany farcical update of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — to make money, naturally.
It is not particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, industrialists, 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 revised the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is at odds with fundamental decency, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Every time politicians respond to a tragic gun violence event by blaming popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. But the daily reports makes it obvious constantly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and importance, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.
If anything, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that impedes meaningful change. Provided with a steady diet of mostly uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away feeling good about good conquering evil. These movies are like cautionary fables, implying that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more lethal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful 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 distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so clear that the wealthy live by a separate justice system, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exclusions
A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
