A recurring theme courses through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion which extends back in time to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Film Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while employing digital impersonations and a well-honed media apparatus to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity as overtly, but its antagonists enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them into unemployment and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Interestingly, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, of course.
There is little inherently notable in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the early days of film, with early comedies setting his always poor Little Tramp character against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with fundamental decency, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. Still the news reveals regularly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and social worth, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies promoting the reverse.
In fact, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes real-world action. Offered a frequent serving of largely happily-ever-after fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more direct, and seemingly more lethal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exclusions
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
