A recurring motif courses through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that stretches back in time to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Film Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through abject destitution, while employing deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its villains live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, sets the scrappy residents of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Even, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, naturally.
There is little inherently notable in a run of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the early days of film, with early comedies setting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against fat cats, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. 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 rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Alters Little
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials respond to a new mass shooting event by faulting graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. But the news demonstrates constantly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and social worth, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
If anything, it appears that the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of predominantly uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about justice being served. These movies are like ethical parables, implying that the system works, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more direct, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, 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, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned 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 apparent that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. 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 exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
