A familiar theme permeates a host of 2025's popular films. It's an idea that goes back in time to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending tens of millions to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Film Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a affluent bad guy running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people living in abject destitution, while using AI forgeries and a sophisticated smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its villains reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them from their homes and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, contrasts the resourceful residents of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the lighthearted humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — for his own profit, naturally.
There is little inherently notable in a series of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme goes back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against fat cats, industrialists, and clueless rich men. From 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 greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Alters Little
However, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Every time politicians follow a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that susceptible — if repeated viewing 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 reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and social worth, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies promoting the opposite.
If anything, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A Sharper Tone 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 angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and seemingly more lethal. It is seldom sufficient 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 oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car finale, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that the wealthy operate under different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
