An age-old motif permeates numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that goes all the way back to the time of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people suffering through extreme hardship, while employing deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division in such a blunt manner, but its villains live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, sets the resourceful residents of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Even, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, needless to say.
It is not inherently notable in a string of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding desire for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting 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 complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials follow a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. Still the daily reports reveals every single day that a alarming number of Americans innately equate riches with smartness and social worth, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.
If anything, it seems like the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders real-world action. Provided with a frequent serving of predominantly triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the end of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
