A familiar motif courses through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that goes far back to the era of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul squandering a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a sophisticated propaganda machine to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains live in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Even, the zany comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to bring about planetary doom — for his own profit, naturally.
It is not particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that rich people have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding desire for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, bosses, and clueless rich men. Starting 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 entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is contrary to core morality, and applaud the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Every time elected officials respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — surely American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the daily reports makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after decades of history's most popular movies promoting the reverse.
Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a frequent serving of largely happily-ever-after fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These movies are like ethical parables, implying that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, perhaps because it’s become so clear that affluent individuals live by different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Outliers
There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
