An age-old motif runs through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that goes far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his vast wealth to defame Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul squandering vast sums to trap the heroes into a monster-filled death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a rich antagonist operating a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through desperate poverty, while using AI forgeries and a well-honed propaganda machine to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity as overtly, but its evil characters reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them from their homes and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, pits the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Even, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against tycoons, industrialists, 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 updated the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion elected officials react to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. And yet the news reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously equate riches with competence and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.
In fact, it appears that the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of largely triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough in the current era 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 oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exceptions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. 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 exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
