A recurring idea courses through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that goes far back to the era of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his vast wealth to defame Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division as overtly, but its villains live in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, contrasts the tough residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to cause global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
There is little inherently notable in a run of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his always poor Little Tramp character against tycoons, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is contrary to fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Alters Little
And yet, somehow, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Every time elected officials react to a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and importance, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying the reverse.
If anything, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that impedes substantive reform. Provided with a steady diet of mostly happily-ever-after stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film satisfied about good conquering evil. These movies are like cautionary fables, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more lethal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful 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 hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Outliers
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* ends up confined to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
