A recurring idea courses through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that stretches all the way back to the days of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his vast wealth to defame Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Film Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a sophisticated media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight economic inequality quite that directly, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, sets the tough residents of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit extravagant gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — for his own profit, naturally.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Alters Little
Nevertheless, somehow, we never actually eating the rich. Every time lawmakers follow a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. Still the news reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.
If anything, it appears that the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of predominantly uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away satisfied about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, pretending that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will root out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more direct, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, 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, greedy, hateful affluent villains were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so clear that affluent individuals live by different standards, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exceptions
Some films diverge, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely 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 future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
