A familiar theme permeates numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that stretches back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to throw the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people living in desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its villains live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, pits the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — to make money, of course.
There’s nothing especially new in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept dates back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against fat cats, bosses, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians respond to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. But the news demonstrates regularly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it seems like the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of largely uplifting fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about right prevailing. These stories are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will identify any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more specific, and seemingly more lethal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, 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, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car finale, likely due to it’s become so clear that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exceptions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses 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
