A familiar idea permeates many of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that stretches all the way back to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed propaganda machine to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them out of jobs and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, pits the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.
There is little inherently notable in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against fat cats, industrialists, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is at odds with core morality, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Changes Nothing
And yet, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion politicians follow a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the headlines reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans innately equate riches with competence and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.
Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that hinders real-world action. Offered a steady diet of largely triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will root out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, possibly since it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exclusions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
