A recurring motif courses through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that goes far back to the time of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its antagonists enjoy obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, sets the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the zany comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that rich people have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his always poor Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Outlet That Alters Little
However, somehow, we never actually taking down the wealthy. 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 actually were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately equate riches with intelligence and importance, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of predominantly happily-ever-after stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about good conquering evil. These stories are like cautionary fables, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and seemingly more lethal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, possibly since it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exclusions
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
