A familiar motif runs through many of 2025's popular films. This notion that stretches back in time to the era of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to defame Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering tens of millions to throw the heroes into a monster-filled arena to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its antagonists reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, pits the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Remarkably, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, of course.
There is little inherently notable in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Alters Little
However, somehow, we never actually taking down the wealthy. On each occasion lawmakers follow a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, 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 wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. But the daily reports makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to intelligence and social worth, even after decades of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.
Actually, it seems like the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes real-world action. Provided with a frequent serving of mostly triumphant fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will weed out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, perhaps because it’s become so clear that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exclusions
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
