A familiar theme permeates numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea which extends far back to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to defame Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity quite that directly, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them from their homes and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in lavish gleaming towers in the sky. Even, the zany humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, naturally.
It is not especially new in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
And yet, somehow, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion lawmakers follow a tragic gun violence event by faulting popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. Still the headlines demonstrates regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately link affluence to intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it looks as though the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Offered a frequent serving of largely triumphant tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like ethical parables, implying that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will identify any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more specific, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson 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, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car finale, possibly since it’s become so clear that the wealthy live by different standards, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the final act of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exceptions
There are exceptions, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
