A recurring theme runs through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept which extends far back to the era of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his vast wealth to defame Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to throw the heroes into a monster-filled arena for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while employing digital impersonations and a well-honed smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division as overtly, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them from their homes and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, pits the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish gleaming towers floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — for financial gain, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, somehow, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion politicians respond to a public shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the news demonstrates regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously equate riches with competence and social worth, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies conveying a contradictory message.
Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a regular dose of mostly triumphant fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will identify any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, 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, greedy, hateful rich individuals were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car ending, possibly since it’s become so clear that affluent individuals operate under different standards, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to perish at the final act of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exclusions
There are exceptions, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
