A familiar theme runs through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that stretches all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Film Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through extreme hardship, while employing digital impersonations and a well-honed smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to bring about global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against tycoons, authority figures, 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 updated the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Alters Little
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. Whenever politicians follow a public shooting event by blaming violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.
If anything, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of largely uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
An Angrier Edge 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 specific, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail finale, possibly since it’s become so apparent that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exclusions
Some films diverge, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
