An age-old motif courses through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that stretches far back to the time of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul investing tens of millions to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people living in desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division in such a blunt manner, but its villains reside in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, pits the resourceful people of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish gleaming towers floating overhead. Even, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — to make money, of course.
There is little especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding desire for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, 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 updated the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is contrary to core morality, and exalt the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials follow a public shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates regularly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.
Actually, it appears that the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a regular dose of mostly triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about justice being served. These films are like ethical parables, implying that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A Sharper Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail ending, possibly since it’s become so clear that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exclusions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. 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 computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
