An age-old idea courses through many of 2025's popular films. This concept that goes back in time to the days of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to defame Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people living in desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a sophisticated propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its villains live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to trigger worldwide catastrophe — to make money, naturally.
There is little inherently notable in a string of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, somehow, we never actually taking down the wealthy. On each occasion elected officials follow a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. But the daily reports demonstrates regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously equate riches with competence and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that hinders meaningful change. Provided with a steady diet of predominantly triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about right prevailing. These movies are like cautionary fables, pretending that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will root out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they do follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, 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 rich individuals were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exceptions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
