A familiar theme courses through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion which extends back in time to the era of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a rich antagonist operating a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Even, the lighthearted farcical update of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, naturally.
It is not particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
However, somehow, we never actually consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials react to a public shooting event by blaming violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. Still the news reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously equate riches with intelligence and importance, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that impedes substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of largely happily-ever-after stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about justice being served. These films are like ethical parables, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car finale, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that the wealthy function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exclusions
There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. 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 exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
