A recurring theme permeates numerous 2025's popular films. It's an idea that stretches far back to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering tens of millions to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality quite that directly, but its evil characters reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, pits the tough people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to cause planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept goes back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is incompatible with basic human values, and exalt the defusing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time lawmakers respond to a tragic gun violence event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. Still the news demonstrates regularly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and importance, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.
If anything, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that hinders meaningful change. Given a steady diet of largely triumphant tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These stories are like cautionary fables, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will weed out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and apparently more fatal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so clear that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
