An age-old idea runs through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that stretches all the way back to the days of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent gleaming towers floating overhead. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, naturally.
It is not inherently notable in a string of movies presupposing that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against tycoons, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to basic human values, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
And yet, somehow, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Every time lawmakers react to a public shooting event by blaming graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after a century of history's most popular movies promoting a contradictory message.
In fact, it seems like the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a steady diet of mostly uplifting tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about right prevailing. These movies are like ethical parables, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy operate under different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
