A familiar idea courses through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that stretches back in time to the days of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its villains live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the resourceful residents of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the zany farcical update of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a series of movies presupposing that rich people have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is contrary to basic human values, and exalt the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
However, somehow, we never actually consuming the elite. Every time politicians respond to a tragic gun violence event by blaming graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. And yet the headlines makes it obvious every single day that a significant portion of Americans innately link affluence to competence and importance, even after a century of history's most popular movies promoting the opposite.
If anything, it seems like the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that impedes meaningful change. Given a steady diet of largely happily-ever-after stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more direct, and seemingly more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people gain some humility 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, selfish, cruel wealthy people were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*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 bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, possibly since it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exclusions
Some films diverge, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
