A recurring idea courses through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept which extends far back to the era of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to defame Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while employing digital impersonations and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy residents of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept dates back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, 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 revised that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
And yet, for some reason, we never actually eating the rich. On each occasion elected officials react to a public shooting event by faulting graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of predominantly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about justice being served. These films are like ethical parables, implying that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more targeted, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
