An age-old idea courses through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that goes all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to defame Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul spending vast sums to throw the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people living in extreme hardship, while using AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who live in extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — to make money, naturally.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that rich people have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding hunger for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. Whenever elected officials respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at 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 collective psyche — certainly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the news makes it obvious regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously equate riches with smartness and social worth, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it appears that the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes real-world action. Given a steady diet of largely uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will root out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more targeted, and observably more lethal. 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 oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
