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An age-old idea runs through many of 2025's popular films. This notion that stretches all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, solely for their own profit.

A Tradition of Cinematic Class Warfare

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about economic inequality as overtly, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Even, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.

There’s nothing particularly surprising in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding appetite for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against tycoons, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the defusing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.

The Catharsis That Alters Little

Nevertheless, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time elected officials respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans innately equate riches with smartness and value to society, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.

If anything, it seems like the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Given a regular dose of mostly uplifting fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.

A More Pointed Edge in 2025

Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, possibly since it’s become so obvious that rich people function with different standards, and are highly probable to buy their way out."

The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.

Key Exceptions

A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid