A recurring theme runs through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that stretches back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his enormous resources to defame Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul spending vast sums to throw the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a sophisticated propaganda machine to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists reside in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the tough residents of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, needless to say.
It is not especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding hunger for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, bosses, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Whenever politicians react to a public shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. Still the daily reports makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating a contradictory message.
If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of largely uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about justice being served. These stories are like ethical parables, suggesting that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more specific, and observably more lethal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exceptions
There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
