A familiar idea courses through numerous 2025's popular films. This concept which extends all the way back to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a rich antagonist running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through extreme hardship, while employing deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division in such a blunt manner, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who live in opulent gleaming towers floating overhead. Remarkably, the zany farcical update of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, of course.
It is not especially new in a string of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme dates back to the early days of film, with early comedies contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is at odds with core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians respond to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — surely American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. But the headlines makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with intelligence and importance, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.
If anything, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders real-world action. Offered a regular dose of mostly triumphant fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away satisfied about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that the system works, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and apparently more lethal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, 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 affluent villains 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 point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to perish at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Outliers
There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
