A familiar idea permeates numerous 2025's popular films. This notion that goes all the way back to the era of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his immense fortune to defame Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending tens of millions to throw the heroes into a monster-filled arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity as overtly, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them from their homes and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, sets the resourceful people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding appetite for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against tycoons, bosses, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Fails to Transform
However, somehow, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Every time politicians respond to a public shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. And yet the news demonstrates regularly that a significant portion of Americans innately equate riches with competence and value to society, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.
In fact, it looks as though 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. Given a regular dose of mostly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about good conquering evil. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will root out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more direct, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, possibly since it’s become so apparent that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Outliers
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
