An age-old motif runs through many of 2025's popular films. This concept that stretches all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated media apparatus to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity as overtly, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, pits the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in extravagant sky-high mansions above the clouds. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.
It is not particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding appetite for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his always poor beloved underdog against corporate bosses, bosses, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is at odds with core morality, and exalt the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Fails to Transform
However, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Whenever politicians follow a new mass shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and social worth, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of largely uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film feeling good about good conquering evil. These films are like cautionary fables, implying that society is just, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more specific, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exceptions
Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
