A familiar motif runs through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that goes back in time to the era of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a rich antagonist running a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality as overtly, but its antagonists live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, pits the tough inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to cause global armageddon — to make money, of course.
There is little especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against corporate bosses, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Alters Little
And yet, for some reason, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Every time elected officials react to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. And yet the news reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans innately equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies conveying the reverse.
In fact, it appears that the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that impedes meaningful change. Provided with a steady diet of predominantly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These movies are like cautionary fables, suggesting that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the mostly 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 sense, they indeed follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more direct, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined 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
