An age-old idea courses through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion which extends back in time to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to defame Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing vast sums to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them into unemployment and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, pits the tough people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme dates back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is contrary to core morality, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Release That Alters Little
However, inexplicably, we never actually eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a public shooting event by blaming violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. But the headlines reveals constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately equate riches with competence and social worth, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating a contradictory message.
In fact, it seems like the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Offered a frequent serving of mostly happily-ever-after tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that society is just, and that plucky heroes will weed out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more targeted, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough in the current era 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 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 enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to perish at the final act of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
