A familiar motif runs through many of 2025's popular films. This notion that stretches far back to the time of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to defame Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring extreme hardship, while employing deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its evil characters enjoy obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, pits the scrappy residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit extravagant gleaming towers floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to cause worldwide catastrophe — to make money, naturally.
There is little inherently notable in a string of movies presupposing that the affluent have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to fundamental decency, and applaud the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, for some reason, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials react to a public shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. Still the news demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting a contradictory message.
In fact, it appears that the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that hinders real-world action. Offered a regular dose of predominantly uplifting tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film feeling good about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more targeted, and seemingly more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were slaughtered 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 rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exceptions
Some films diverge, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the computer world, a setup that obviously 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 antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
