A familiar theme courses through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that stretches back in time to the time of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to throw the heroes into a monster-filled arena to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and framed her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Cinematic Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people living in abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality quite that directly, but its villains enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the tough people of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Even, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, needless to say.
It is not especially new in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. From 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 tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion lawmakers follow a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that susceptible — 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 worship billionaires. Still the headlines makes it obvious constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with competence and importance, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.
If anything, it appears that the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of largely uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about justice being served. These movies are like ethical parables, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they indeed follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more specific, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car finale, possibly since it’s become so clear that the wealthy function with different standards, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to perish at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid