An age-old idea permeates numerous 2025's popular films. It's an idea that stretches back in time to the era of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to defame Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul squandering tens of millions to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its antagonists reside in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, naturally.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a run of movies presupposing that rich people have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is at odds with core morality, and exalt the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. Whenever elected officials respond to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the daily reports demonstrates regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and social worth, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies promoting a contradictory message.
In fact, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a steady diet of predominantly uplifting fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about justice being served. These films are like ethical parables, implying that the system works, and that determined protagonists will root out any corrupt individuals among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and apparently more fatal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car ending, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that the wealthy live by a separate justice system, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exclusions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. 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 unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
