An age-old theme permeates many of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that goes far back to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while using deepfakes and a sophisticated smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, contrasts the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in opulent gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, of course.
It is not inherently notable in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is at odds with basic human values, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time politicians follow a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. Still the news demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies promoting the reverse.
In fact, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Provided with a frequent serving of largely uplifting fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that society is just, and that determined protagonists will root out any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more direct, and apparently more lethal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
