A recurring motif courses through 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 antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro investing vast sums to trap the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed media apparatus to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about wealth disparity as overtly, but its antagonists reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, contrasts the resourceful inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant gleaming towers above the clouds. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
It is not particularly surprising in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged desire for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised 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 assume that affluence is contrary to core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Release That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials react to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies conveying a contradictory message.
In fact, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and seemingly more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to perish at the final act of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exceptions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
