An age-old idea runs through many of 2025's popular films. It's an idea that goes far back to the era of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul investing tens of millions to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people enduring abject destitution, while using digital impersonations and a sophisticated smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality as overtly, but its villains enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, contrasts the tough inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to cause global armageddon — to make money, of course.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled desire for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is at odds with fundamental decency, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Alters Little
However, for some reason, we never actually 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 regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans innately link affluence to competence and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.
In fact, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of largely triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more specific, and seemingly more violent. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the computer world, 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 Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
