A familiar theme courses through numerous 2025's popular films. This concept that goes all the way back to the days of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his enormous resources 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 spending tens of millions to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed propaganda machine to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, contrasts the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
It is not especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, 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 revised the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time politicians react to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the news demonstrates constantly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously equate riches with intelligence and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies promoting a contradictory message.
In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Provided with a regular dose of predominantly triumphant tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away feeling good about justice being served. These movies are like ethical parables, implying that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A Sharper Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more specific, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people gain some humility 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, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so clear that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Outliers
There are exceptions, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, 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 reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
