A familiar idea courses through numerous 2025's popular films. This notion that goes all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people living in desperate poverty, while using AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality as overtly, but its villains enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, contrasts the resourceful residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in opulent sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Changes Nothing
And yet, somehow, we never get around to consuming the elite. Whenever politicians react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to intelligence and importance, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies conveying a contradictory message.
Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that hinders substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of mostly uplifting tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more direct, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so clear that affluent individuals operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the virtual grid, 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 exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
