An age-old motif runs through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept which extends all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul spending tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and framed her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Cinematic Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division quite that directly, but its evil characters reside in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.
It is not inherently notable in a series of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme dates back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Alters Little
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never actually eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers follow a tragic gun violence event by faulting graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — certainly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. Still the news demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously equate riches with smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting the reverse.
Actually, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that hinders substantive reform. Given a steady diet of largely triumphant fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more specific, and seemingly more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson 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 rich individuals were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exceptions
There are exceptions, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
