An age-old theme runs through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that stretches all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to defame Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who live in extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Even, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to cause planetary doom — for his own profit, naturally.
It is not especially new in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding desire for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. 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 greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with basic human values, and exalt the defusing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
However, somehow, we never get around to eating the rich. Whenever lawmakers follow a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. Still the daily reports makes it obvious regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously equate riches with smartness and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies communicating a contradictory message.
If anything, it seems like the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of mostly uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away content about good conquering evil. These stories are like cautionary fables, implying that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and apparently more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*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*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by different standards, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Outliers
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends 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* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
