A familiar motif permeates a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that goes all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to defame Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul spending vast sums to throw the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people living in abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated propaganda machine to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the tough inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Even, the zany farcical update of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies setting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
However, somehow, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials follow a public shooting event by faulting graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. But the headlines makes it obvious constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with competence and social worth, even after a century of history's most popular movies promoting a contradictory message.
In fact, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a regular dose of mostly happily-ever-after tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any corrupt individuals among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more direct, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, possibly since it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals live by different standards, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exceptions
Some films diverge, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. 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
