An age-old motif runs through numerous 2025's popular films. It's an idea that goes far back to the era of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his enormous resources to defame Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a well-honed smear campaign to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight economic inequality quite that directly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, pits the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in extravagant gleaming towers above the clouds. Interestingly, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a series of movies presupposing that rich people have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding desire for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against corporate bosses, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to fundamental decency, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
However, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the news reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to intelligence and importance, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that hinders real-world action. Given a frequent serving of largely triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film feeling good about good conquering evil. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will identify any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more direct, and apparently more fatal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals function with a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
