An age-old motif permeates many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that goes back in time to the time of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering a fortune to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Film Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while employing digital impersonations and a well-honed smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division in such a blunt manner, but its villains reside in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in extravagant sky-high mansions floating overhead. Even, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to cause worldwide catastrophe — to make money, needless to say.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme dates back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his always poor beloved underdog against fat cats, bosses, 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 revised the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
However, somehow, we never actually eating the rich. Whenever politicians respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — certainly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. Still the daily reports makes it obvious constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously link affluence to competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.
In fact, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of predominantly happily-ever-after fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more targeted, and apparently more fatal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car finale, likely due to it’s become so clear that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
