A recurring idea permeates many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that stretches all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to defame Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Film Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people living in desperate poverty, while employing digital impersonations and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity quite that directly, but its evil characters enjoy conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, contrasts the tough people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a series of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his always poor Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, authority figures, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is contrary to core morality, and applaud the defusing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time lawmakers respond to a public shooting event by blaming graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. Still the headlines makes it obvious every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating a contradictory message.
If anything, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that hinders real-world action. Provided with a frequent serving of mostly uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will identify any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they do follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more targeted, and seemingly more violent. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, 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, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so clear that the wealthy operate under different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exceptions
Some films diverge, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
