A recurring idea permeates many of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea which extends far back to the days of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul squandering tens of millions to cast the heroes into a monster-filled arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity quite that directly, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them from their homes and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the resourceful residents of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent gleaming towers floating overhead. Even, the lighthearted humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept dates back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting 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 updated a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Alters Little
Nevertheless, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion politicians follow a public shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society would not continue to revere billionaires. And yet the news demonstrates constantly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.
If anything, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a frequent serving of largely uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they do follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more specific, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death 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 obvious that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
