A recurring theme permeates numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that goes all the way back to the era of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Cinematic Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful media apparatus to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight economic inequality quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in extravagant sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to bring about global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
It is not especially new in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against corporate bosses, authority figures, 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 that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is contrary to fundamental decency, and applaud the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. But the news demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously link affluence to smartness and importance, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.
In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that hinders real-world action. Provided with a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people be taught a lesson 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, selfish, cruel affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exceptions
There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
