An age-old motif courses through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that stretches all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people living in abject destitution, while using deepfakes and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the lighthearted farcical update of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to cause planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. From 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 tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Alters Little
Nevertheless, for some reason, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians follow a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. But the news makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively equate riches with smartness and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it seems like the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of mostly uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and observably 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 oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so clear that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
