A familiar idea runs through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion which extends back in time to the time of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing vast sums to throw the heroes into a prehistoric arena to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people living in desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight economic inequality quite that directly, but its evil characters enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the resourceful people of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the zany humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
It is not especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme dates back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his always poor Little Tramp character against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
However, somehow, we never actually consuming the elite. Whenever politicians react to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at 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 allow it to permeate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. Still the headlines makes it obvious constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies promoting the reverse.
If anything, it appears that the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that hinders real-world action. Given a regular dose of predominantly triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away satisfied about justice being served. These movies are like ethical parables, pretending that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more targeted, and apparently more fatal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people be taught a lesson 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, greedy, hateful affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that the wealthy function with different standards, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exclusions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
