A recurring idea courses through a host of 2025's popular films. It's an idea that stretches all the way back to the time of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering vast sums to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while using deepfakes and a sophisticated smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, sets the resourceful residents of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Even, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.
It is not especially new in a series of movies presupposing that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled desire for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, industrialists, 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 updated that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to basic human values, and applaud the defusing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Outlet That Alters Little
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion lawmakers follow a public shooting event by blaming graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the headlines makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.
If anything, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a frequent serving of mostly uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film satisfied about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more specific, and apparently more lethal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, possibly since it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals operate under a separate justice system, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exclusions
There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
