A recurring motif permeates numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that goes far back to the time of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains enjoy clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, pits the scrappy residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit opulent gleaming towers above the clouds. Interestingly, the zany comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to bring about planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.
It is not especially new in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies setting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against corporate bosses, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. 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 exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Fails to Transform
However, somehow, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Whenever lawmakers follow a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the news demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously equate riches with competence and importance, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating a contradictory message.
Actually, it appears that the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that hinders real-world action. Provided with a steady diet of largely triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like ethical parables, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will root out any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more specific, and seemingly more fatal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people learn a useful 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, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, possibly since it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to perish at the end of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. 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 unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
