A familiar motif permeates numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that stretches back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division as overtly, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Interestingly, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — to make money, of course.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Release That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never actually consuming the elite. Every time elected officials respond to a new mass shooting event by blaming violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the headlines reveals regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and value to society, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.
If anything, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders real-world action. Provided with a regular dose of largely triumphant stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about right prevailing. These films are like ethical parables, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will root out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A Sharper Tone 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 more enraged, sharper, more direct, and seemingly more violent. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people gain some humility 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, selfish, cruel rich individuals were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
