A recurring theme runs through many of 2025's popular films. This concept that goes far back to the time of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro investing vast sums to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Film Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through extreme hardship, while employing deepfakes and a sophisticated media apparatus to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the resourceful residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in extravagant sky-high mansions floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to bring about planetary doom — to make money, naturally.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against fat cats, 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 refreshed that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is contrary to basic human values, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Alters Little
And yet, somehow, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. But the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after decades of history's most popular movies promoting the reverse.
If anything, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes real-world action. Provided with a steady diet of mostly uplifting 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, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will root out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient 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 subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail ending, possibly since it’s become so clear that rich people function with different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exclusions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
