An age-old theme courses through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that stretches far back to the era of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending a fortune to throw the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring extreme hardship, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Interestingly, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — to make money, needless to say.
It is not particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that rich people have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, somehow, we never get around to eating the rich. Whenever elected officials respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to intelligence and importance, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.
Actually, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a frequent serving of mostly triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away satisfied about good conquering evil. These movies are like cautionary fables, suggesting that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more lethal. It’s rarely enough in the current era 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, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the final act of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exceptions
There are exceptions, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
