A familiar theme courses through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that goes back in time to the time of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people living in abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a sophisticated smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division quite that directly, but its antagonists enjoy obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the lighthearted humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged desire for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against fat cats, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and applaud the defusing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never get around to eating the rich. Every time lawmakers follow a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the headlines makes it obvious every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after decades 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 created a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a steady diet of largely happily-ever-after stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more specific, and seemingly more violent. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
