A recurring motif courses through numerous 2025's popular films. It's an idea that goes far back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his vast wealth to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people living in desperate poverty, while using deepfakes and a well-honed smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division quite that directly, but its evil characters reside in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, contrasts the scrappy inhabitants of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Even, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to cause planetary doom — for his own profit, naturally.
It is not particularly surprising in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding desire for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against tycoons, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to core morality, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we never actually eating the rich. Every time lawmakers respond to a public shooting event by blaming violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. Still the headlines makes it obvious constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
Actually, it seems like the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of largely uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away feeling good about good conquering evil. These stories are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will identify any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more specific, and apparently more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car finale, perhaps because it’s become so clear that the wealthy function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the virtual grid, 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 revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
