An age-old theme permeates many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that goes back in time to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul spending tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Film Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed propaganda machine to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division in such a blunt manner, but its villains live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the resourceful people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger worldwide catastrophe — to make money, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with 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 Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians react to a public shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — surely American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the news demonstrates regularly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and value to society, even after decades of history's most popular movies promoting the reverse.
In fact, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that impedes substantive reform. Given a regular dose of mostly triumphant stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film feeling good about right prevailing. These movies are like cautionary fables, implying that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more specific, and observably more lethal. It’s rarely enough nowadays 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 exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, possibly since it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals live by different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exclusions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously 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 revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
