A recurring motif runs through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that goes far back to the days of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring abject destitution, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed smear campaign to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its villains enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Even, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, naturally.
It is not especially new in a series of movies presupposing that the affluent have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Alters Little
Nevertheless, somehow, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time elected officials follow a tragic gun violence event by blaming graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the news demonstrates constantly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that hinders substantive reform. Given a steady diet of mostly uplifting fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more specific, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people live by different standards, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exclusions
Some films diverge, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
