LOS ANGELES — In theaters and on streaming, anti-billionaire movies became one of 2025’s clearest blockbuster patterns, with ultra-wealthy power brokers driving conflicts from Superman to Zootopia 2, Dec. 29, 2025.
The shift wasn’t a single Hollywood manifesto. It was a steady rewriting of who gets framed as “dangerous” in mainstream stories: not the outsider, but the person with limitless resources, influence and a PR machine.
How anti-billionaire movies went mainstream
In James Gunn’s Superman, Lex Luthor isn’t just a comic-book genius — he’s built like a modern tech baron, using wealth, media and political access to shape events while selling himself as the solution. The Ringer’s look at Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor describes a villain engineered for a decade when billionaires don’t just buy things — they try to buy the narrative.
Zootopia 2 packages similar skepticism for a family audience. The sequel kicks off at a glamorous gala centered on a prized historical book, then turns into a chase after Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde get framed and end up on the run with a pit viper, Gary De’Snake, according to a plot rundown from Disney’s Annecy presentation. Instead of a neat “good vs. evil” moral, the film leans into who controls history, who gets locked out of the city’s promises — and who benefits when fear gets weaponized.
Critic Nell Minow’s RogerEbert.com review calls the movie “an ode to community” that asks viewers to stay open-minded about who to trust — while also spotlighting Zootopia’s blind spots and exclusions. That’s a softer cousin of the same idea driving anti-billionaire movies: concentrated power, not just individual bad behavior, is the threat.
What anti-billionaire movies borrow from the “eat the rich” era
Anti-billionaire movies weren’t born in 2025. They’re a mainstreaming of the “eat the rich” cycle that ran hot earlier in the decade, when stories like Glass Onion, The Menu and Triangle of Sadness made wealth itself the joke — and sometimes the horror. Vanity Fair’s 2022 critique of the wave argued those satires often promised brutal comeuppance but pulled their punches.
A year later, an El País analysis traced how the “suffering of the rich” became a recurring screen trend — fueled by rising inequality and audience resentment — while warning that these stories can also glamorize the very worlds they claim to condemn.
In 2025, the angle broadened. HBO’s Mountainhead put billionaire self-mythology under a microscope, staging a weekend retreat where tech titans debate the world as chaos erupts outside. An AP review of the film framed it as a “tech bro-pocalypse,” a satire built around the casual detachment of the ultra-rich.
And audiences didn’t exactly punish the message at the box office. Deadline’s box office report said Zootopia 2 crossed $1 billion worldwide in 17 days — proof that anti-billionaire movies can land even when they’re attached to the safest, most corporate brands in town.
Whether the trend sharpens into real critique or hardens into a new default villain template is the next test. For now, anti-billionaire movies are doing what pop entertainment often does best: taking a public mood — distrust of the ultra-rich — and turning it into story fuel.
