An age-old idea permeates numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that stretches back in time to the era of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro investing vast sums to throw the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, all for their own profit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while employing deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its villains reside in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the resourceful residents of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who live in opulent sky-high mansions above the clouds. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to bring about worldwide catastrophe — to make money, of course.
There is little especially new in a run of movies presupposing that rich people have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme dates back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Release That Alters Little
However, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time elected officials respond to a public shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. Still the daily reports reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and social worth, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating a contradictory message.
In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that gets in the way of meaningful change. Offered a frequent serving of mostly uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film feeling good about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will root out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more targeted, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays 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, greedy, hateful rich individuals were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed 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 finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people live by a separate justice system, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exclusions
A few stories differ, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. 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 revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
