A recurring theme courses through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea which extends back in time to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his immense fortune to defame Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers 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 Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people living in extreme hardship, while using deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality quite that directly, but its villains live in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, pits the resourceful people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gleaming towers above the clouds. Even, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to cause worldwide catastrophe — to make money, needless to say.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Alters Little
However, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society would not continue to worship billionaires. Still the news reveals regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and value to society, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating a contradictory message.
In fact, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a frequent serving of mostly uplifting tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away feeling good about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will identify any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more targeted, and apparently more lethal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exclusions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
