A familiar motif permeates numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that goes far back to the era of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to defame Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to cast the heroes into a monster-filled arena to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Film Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while using deepfakes and a well-honed media apparatus to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, pits the scrappy residents of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to cause planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
And yet, somehow, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time politicians respond to a tragic gun violence event by faulting graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the daily reports makes it obvious constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating a contradictory message.
Actually, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes substantive reform. Given a steady diet of mostly uplifting tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about justice being served. These films are like cautionary fables, suggesting that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any corrupt individuals among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more direct, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
