A familiar motif runs through many of 2025's popular films. This notion that stretches all the way back to the era of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his vast wealth to defame Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division quite that directly, but its evil characters enjoy obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, pits the resourceful inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Interestingly, the zany humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding hunger for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we never actually consuming the elite. Whenever lawmakers follow a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and importance, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.
If anything, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of largely triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about good conquering evil. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that determined protagonists will root out any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so clear that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Outliers
There are exceptions, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
