A familiar theme courses through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept which extends all the way back to the time of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to defame Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending tens of millions to cast the heroes into a monster-filled death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while employing digital impersonations and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its evil characters reside in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, pits the tough people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Even, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.
It is not inherently notable in a string of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme goes back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor beloved underdog against corporate bosses, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is contrary to fundamental decency, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Alters Little
And yet, for some reason, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the daily reports reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively associate wealth with competence and importance, even after a century of history's most popular movies promoting the reverse.
Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of predominantly triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will root out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and seemingly more violent. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under different standards, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to perish at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exceptions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
