An age-old idea courses through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea which extends back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his vast wealth to defame Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled death trap to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through abject destitution, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Even, the lighthearted humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to trigger worldwide catastrophe — to make money, needless to say.
It is not especially new in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged desire for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story 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 contrary to basic human values, and applaud the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Alters Little
And yet, somehow, we never get around to eating the rich. Every time politicians react to a public shooting event by blaming graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously equate riches with competence and importance, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it appears that the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders meaningful change. Given a regular dose of mostly triumphant tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These movies are like ethical parables, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more specific, and seemingly more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people be taught a 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, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, possibly since it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exclusions
There are exceptions, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
