A familiar motif runs through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that stretches back in time to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to defame Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul spending a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people living in desperate poverty, while using AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division as overtly, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy farcical update of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger worldwide catastrophe — to make money, of course.
There is little especially new in a string of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept dates back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and exalt the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
However, for some reason, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials follow a new mass shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the headlines makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately link affluence to smartness and importance, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies promoting the reverse.
If anything, it seems like the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that gets in the way of meaningful change. Provided with a steady diet of predominantly happily-ever-after tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like ethical parables, implying that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more targeted, and seemingly more fatal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car finale, possibly since it’s become so obvious that rich people function with different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exclusions
Some films diverge, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
