A familiar motif runs through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion which extends all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity quite that directly, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them into unemployment and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the resourceful people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent sky-high mansions above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
There is little especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Release That Changes Nothing
However, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion elected officials respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously equate riches with intelligence and importance, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it appears that the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that impedes meaningful change. Given a steady diet of mostly happily-ever-after stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will root out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more direct, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals live by their own legal rules, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exclusions
There are exceptions, of course. 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 virtual grid, where he’s clearly 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 antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
