🔗 Share this article

An age-old motif courses through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that stretches all the way back to the era of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering a fortune to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.

A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy

In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people enduring abject destitution, while using deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division as overtly, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them from their homes and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, sets the tough people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, of course.

There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding appetite for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.

The Catharsis That Changes Nothing

Nevertheless, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Whenever elected officials follow a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — surely American society would not continue to worship billionaires. Still the news demonstrates constantly that a significant portion of Americans innately link affluence to competence and value to society, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies promoting the reverse.

If anything, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Offered a frequent serving of mostly uplifting fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about good conquering evil. These stories are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any corrupt individuals among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.

A More Pointed Tone in 2025

Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more direct, and seemingly more fatal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."

The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.

Significant Outliers

There are exceptions, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the digital realm, a setup that obviously 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 culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid