An age-old theme permeates many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept which extends all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his immense fortune to defame Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people living in abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the resourceful inhabitants of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gleaming towers above the clouds. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger worldwide catastrophe — to make money, naturally.
It is not especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is contrary to basic human values, and exalt the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Changes Nothing
However, somehow, we never get around to eating the rich. Whenever lawmakers follow a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. Still the headlines makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with smartness and value to society, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting a contradictory message.
Actually, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that impedes substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of mostly uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These stories are like cautionary fables, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more direct, and apparently more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, 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 killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by different standards, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
