A recurring theme courses through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that goes back in time to the era of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and framed her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of On-Screen Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated propaganda machine to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about economic inequality as overtly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, sets the resourceful residents of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent gleaming towers above the clouds. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — to make money, needless to say.
There is little inherently notable in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is incompatible with fundamental decency, and applaud the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Release That Alters Little
And yet, for some reason, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers follow a tragic gun violence event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. But the news reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously equate riches with competence and importance, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying the reverse.
Actually, it appears that the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a steady diet of largely happily-ever-after stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These films are like ethical parables, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will identify any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more direct, and seemingly more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exceptions
There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only 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 possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
