A familiar motif runs through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion which extends back in time to the time of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people suffering through extreme hardship, while leveraging digital impersonations and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity as overtly, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, contrasts the tough residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, bosses, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is contrary to fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, somehow, we never actually consuming the elite. On each occasion politicians respond to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — surely American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the headlines reveals every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies conveying a contradictory message.
If anything, it looks as though the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that gets in the way of meaningful change. Offered a steady diet of predominantly uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about good conquering evil. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more specific, and seemingly more lethal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car ending, likely due to it’s become so clear that rich people operate under different standards, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exclusions
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the digital realm, 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 redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
