A recurring theme courses through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that goes back in time to the days of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people living in desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a sophisticated propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity quite that directly, but its antagonists enjoy obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in opulent gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against corporate bosses, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is contrary to core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Alters Little
However, inexplicably, we never actually consuming the elite. Every time lawmakers react to a public shooting event by blaming graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the news reveals regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it seems like the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that impedes substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of mostly triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about good conquering evil. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more direct, and apparently more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exceptions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
