A familiar theme runs through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that stretches all the way back to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through abject destitution, while employing deepfakes and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division as overtly, but its villains enjoy obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, contrasts the tough inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
It is not inherently notable in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding appetite for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor beloved underdog against fat cats, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is at odds with fundamental decency, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Changes Nothing
However, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Whenever politicians respond to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the headlines makes it obvious regularly that a significant portion of Americans innately equate riches with intelligence and value to society, even after decades of history's most popular movies conveying a contradictory message.
Actually, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of largely uplifting fables 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 cautionary fables, suggesting that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they indeed follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more direct, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, 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 rich individuals were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the final act of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exclusions
Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
