A familiar idea permeates numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea which extends far back to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and framed her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Film Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people suffering through extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful propaganda machine to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity as overtly, but its evil characters enjoy conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the scrappy residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who live in extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — to make money, naturally.
There is little inherently notable in a series of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is at odds with basic human values, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, for some reason, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. On each occasion politicians respond to a tragic gun violence event by blaming graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the daily reports demonstrates regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and value to society, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies promoting the opposite.
Actually, it seems like the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that impedes real-world action. Offered a regular dose of mostly happily-ever-after tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will identify any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more specific, and seemingly more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, 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 giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, possibly since it’s become so clear that rich people function with different standards, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exceptions
There are exceptions, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
