A recurring motif courses through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that goes all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to defame Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Cinematic Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while using deepfakes and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, contrasts the tough inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to cause planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.
There is little especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies pitting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously link affluence to intelligence and importance, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
If anything, it appears that the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders meaningful change. Given a regular dose of mostly uplifting stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about justice being served. These movies are like cautionary fables, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will root out any corrupt individuals among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more targeted, and seemingly more fatal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car ending, likely due to it’s become so clear that affluent individuals live by their own legal rules, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
