An age-old idea runs through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea which extends far back to the time of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering tens of millions to throw the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists reside in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, contrasts the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged desire for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against tycoons, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is at odds with fundamental decency, and celebrate the defusing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, somehow, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I sigh with frustration, 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 persistently revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious regularly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it seems like the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Provided with a frequent serving of mostly triumphant tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film feeling good about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they indeed follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car finale, likely due to it’s become so clear that the wealthy live by different standards, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exceptions
Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
