A familiar theme runs through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion which extends far back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to defame Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul investing tens of millions to trap the heroes into a monster-filled death trap to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated propaganda machine to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its villains reside in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, pits the tough inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Interestingly, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.
There is little inherently notable in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding desire for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is at odds with basic human values, and exalt the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Release That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Every time politicians follow a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — surely American society would not continue to revere billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates constantly that a alarming number of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and social worth, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies conveying the reverse.
In fact, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders real-world action. Given a regular dose of largely uplifting stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and seemingly more lethal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exclusions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
