A familiar idea courses through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that goes far back to the era of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while using deepfakes and a well-honed smear campaign to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the tough people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in extravagant gleaming towers above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, naturally.
It is not particularly surprising in a series of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding hunger for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies setting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Release That Alters Little
Nevertheless, somehow, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Every time elected officials respond to a public shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. But the headlines reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously link affluence to smartness and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.
Actually, it appears that the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that hinders real-world action. Given a regular dose of mostly uplifting stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These stories are like cautionary fables, suggesting that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, perhaps because it’s become so clear that affluent individuals live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exclusions
There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
