An age-old idea courses through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that goes all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to defame Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul spending tens of millions to throw the heroes into a monster-filled arena for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist 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 well-honed propaganda machine to depict 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 enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them from their homes and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the resourceful inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged desire for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme dates back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against corporate bosses, bosses, and clueless rich men. Starting 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 exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is at odds with core morality, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Whenever lawmakers react to a new mass shooting event by faulting graphic media, 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 societal mindset — surely American society would not continue to revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and social worth, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies communicating a contradictory message.
In fact, it seems like the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a steady diet of largely triumphant stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and seemingly more lethal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, possibly since it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Exclusions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
