A familiar motif permeates a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept which extends all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to trap the heroes into a monster-filled arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, all for their own profit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in opulent sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding appetite for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Every time politicians follow a public shooting event by faulting graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. Still the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.
In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that impedes substantive reform. Given a regular dose of largely triumphant tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will weed out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, possibly since it’s become so clear that affluent individuals function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Outliers
There are exceptions, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the computer world, where he’s clearly 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 revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
