An age-old idea courses through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that stretches all the way back to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul squandering a fortune to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a affluent bad guy running a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people enduring abject destitution, while employing deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its villains enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, pits the tough inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, of course.
It is not especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, somehow, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Whenever lawmakers react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious regularly that a significant portion of Americans innately link affluence to intelligence and importance, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies conveying the reverse.
Actually, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders meaningful change. Provided with a steady diet of largely triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more specific, and seemingly more fatal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy operate under different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to die at the final act of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Exceptions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
