An age-old motif permeates many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that stretches far back to the days of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through abject destitution, while employing deepfakes and a sophisticated propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about wealth disparity as overtly, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, sets the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent sky-high mansions floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — to make money, of course.
It is not particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against tycoons, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is at odds with core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time lawmakers follow a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously equate riches with smartness and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it seems like the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a steady diet of largely uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These films are like cautionary fables, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more direct, and observably more lethal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, 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 affluent villains were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exclusions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses 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
