A recurring idea permeates many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that goes back in time to the era of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through desperate poverty, while employing digital impersonations and a sophisticated media apparatus to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity quite that directly, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who live in opulent sky-high mansions floating overhead. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.
It is not especially new in a string of movies presupposing that rich people have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding appetite for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers follow a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates constantly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies conveying the reverse.
Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that hinders meaningful change. Given a frequent serving of predominantly triumphant tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater content about good conquering evil. These movies are like ethical parables, implying that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and apparently more violent. It is no longer satisfactory these days 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 oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals operate under different standards, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the end of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exclusions
There are exceptions, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
