A familiar theme permeates a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea which extends back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro investing vast sums to trap the heroes into a prehistoric death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a sophisticated smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them into unemployment and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, contrasts the resourceful inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Interestingly, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, naturally.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept dates back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against fat cats, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is at odds with fundamental decency, and celebrate the defusing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Release That Changes Nothing
And yet, for some reason, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers follow a tragic gun violence event by faulting graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious constantly that a significant portion of Americans innately equate riches with competence and social worth, even after a century of history's most popular movies conveying the opposite.
If anything, it appears that the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of meaningful change. Provided with a frequent serving of largely happily-ever-after fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and seemingly more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, 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 consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Outliers
There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
