A recurring idea runs through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that goes back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people enduring extreme hardship, while using deepfakes and a well-honed smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in extravagant sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to bring about global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies pitting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against tycoons, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is contrary to fundamental decency, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
And yet, for some reason, we never actually eating the rich. Whenever elected officials follow a new mass shooting event by blaming graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. And yet the news demonstrates constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies promoting the opposite.
Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of predominantly uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like cautionary fables, suggesting that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more direct, and seemingly more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail finale, perhaps because it’s become so clear that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exclusions
A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. 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 frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
