A familiar theme courses through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept which extends back in time to the days of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while using deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality quite that directly, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, contrasts the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent sky-high mansions floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, of course.
It is not especially new in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is contrary to fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never get around to eating the rich. Every time elected officials follow a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies conveying the reverse.
In fact, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Provided with a regular dose of predominantly uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will root out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, 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 rich individuals were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*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 murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car ending, likely due to it’s become so clear that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Outliers
There are exceptions, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of 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
