A recurring idea courses through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that goes all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Film Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while using AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division in such a blunt manner, but its villains reside in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the resourceful inhabitants of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent sky-high mansions in the sky. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme dates back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is at odds with fundamental decency, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Release That Alters Little
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials respond to a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. And yet the daily reports reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies promoting a contradictory message.
If anything, it looks as though the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that hinders real-world action. Offered a steady diet of predominantly happily-ever-after fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about good conquering evil. These films are like ethical parables, pretending that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will identify any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more direct, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, possibly since it’s become so obvious that rich people live by different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Outliers
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the digital realm, 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 reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
