An age-old idea runs through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion which extends back in time to the days of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled death trap to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and framed her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people living in extreme hardship, while employing digital impersonations and a well-honed propaganda machine to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its villains enjoy conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them from their homes and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to cause worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, of course.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against tycoons, industrialists, 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 revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
However, for some reason, we never get around to eating the rich. Whenever lawmakers follow a tragic gun violence event by faulting popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the news reveals every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies conveying a contradictory message.
Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about justice being served. These movies are like ethical parables, suggesting that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more direct, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car finale, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that rich people live by different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
