A recurring theme runs through a host of 2025's popular films. This concept which extends back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to smear Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul investing tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring extreme hardship, while employing deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them into unemployment and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, contrasts the scrappy inhabitants of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
It is not especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding appetite for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against fat cats, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is contrary to basic human values, and applaud the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, somehow, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians follow a tragic gun violence event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. But the headlines reveals every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies conveying a contradictory message.
Actually, it appears that the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that impedes meaningful change. Provided with a regular dose of largely happily-ever-after fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that the system works, and that plucky heroes will root out any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and observably more lethal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
