A familiar motif runs through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that stretches far back to the era of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to trap the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Film Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people suffering through extreme hardship, while using digital impersonations and a sophisticated propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them from their homes and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, pits the tough people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Remarkably, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against fat cats, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never actually eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. Still the headlines makes it obvious constantly that a significant portion of Americans innately link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies conveying the reverse.
Actually, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that hinders real-world action. Given a regular dose of predominantly uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film content about justice being served. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that society is just, and that determined protagonists will root out any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A Sharper Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more direct, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people gain some humility 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, greedy, hateful wealthy people were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car ending, possibly since it’s become so clear that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to perish at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Outliers
Some films diverge, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. 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 exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
