An age-old idea courses through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that goes back in time to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its villains enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, contrasts the resourceful people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who live in extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Interestingly, the lighthearted humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, and clueless rich men. 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 whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and applaud the defusing, downfall, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Release That Changes Nothing
And yet, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. Whenever lawmakers respond to a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously link affluence to competence and importance, even after a century of history's most popular movies conveying the reverse.
If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a regular dose of predominantly triumphant tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about good conquering evil. These movies are like ethical parables, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and apparently more violent. It is no longer satisfactory these days 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 exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Outliers
There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. 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 revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
