An age-old motif runs through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that goes far back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to throw the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a sophisticated propaganda machine to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its villains live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit extravagant gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to bring about worldwide catastrophe — to make money, naturally.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, for some reason, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers react to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society would not continue to revere billionaires. And yet the news demonstrates regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and social worth, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that hinders substantive reform. Offered a frequent serving of predominantly happily-ever-after tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like ethical parables, suggesting that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more targeted, and apparently more fatal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era 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 subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car ending, possibly since it’s become so clear that affluent individuals live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exceptions
Some films diverge, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
