A familiar motif runs through many of 2025's popular films. This concept that goes all the way back to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a prehistoric arena for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while using AI forgeries and a powerful propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division in such a blunt manner, but its villains reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them out of jobs and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, contrasts the tough inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a run of movies presupposing that rich people have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is contrary to fundamental decency, and exalt the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Alters Little
However, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Whenever politicians react to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — certainly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. And yet the news demonstrates constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively equate riches with intelligence and importance, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that impedes meaningful change. Provided with a frequent serving of predominantly triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like ethical parables, pretending that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will root out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more specific, and apparently more lethal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era 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 subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on live TV (*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 super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exclusions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
