A familiar theme runs through a host of 2025's popular films. It's an idea which extends back in time to the era of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed propaganda machine to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, contrasts the resourceful inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent gleaming towers floating overhead. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, bosses, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Changes Nothing
And yet, somehow, we never actually consuming the elite. Every time politicians react to a new mass shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society would not continue to worship billionaires. But the news demonstrates regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after decades of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that hinders real-world action. Given a regular dose of predominantly triumphant fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will root out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more direct, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory 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, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
