A recurring idea courses through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that goes back in time to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing tens of millions to trap the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while employing digital impersonations and a well-honed smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its villains live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the tough people of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in lavish sky-high mansions floating overhead. Interestingly, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to cause worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, of course.
It is not especially new in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies setting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to basic human values, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Every time lawmakers follow a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. Still the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies promoting a contradictory message.
Actually, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of largely uplifting tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will weed out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more direct, and seemingly more violent. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exceptions
There are exceptions, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, where he’s clearly 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 revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
