A familiar theme runs through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that stretches all the way back to the era of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to defame Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul spending tens of millions to throw the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through abject destitution, while employing deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division quite that directly, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, driving them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in opulent gleaming towers floating overhead. Remarkably, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to bring about global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
It is not especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding desire for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against fat cats, 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 refreshed a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is at odds with fundamental decency, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we never get around to eating the rich. Whenever lawmakers follow a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the news reveals every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously equate riches with intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.
Actually, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Given a regular dose of predominantly triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away content about good conquering evil. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will identify any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and apparently more lethal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people gain some humility 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, selfish, cruel rich individuals were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, possibly since it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals operate under different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exclusions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely 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 a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
