A recurring idea courses through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that goes all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to smear Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending tens of millions to trap the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its antagonists live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, sets the tough inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, naturally.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
However, for some reason, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a new mass shooting event by blaming violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. Still the news demonstrates regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously link affluence to intelligence and social worth, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.
If anything, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that hinders substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of mostly happily-ever-after fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Even though 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 angrier, sharper, more specific, and seemingly more fatal. It’s rarely enough these days 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, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, perhaps because it’s become so clear that affluent individuals operate under different standards, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to perish at the end of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the computer world, where he’s clearly 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 unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
