A recurring theme courses through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that goes all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its villains enjoy obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a run of movies presupposing that rich people have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against tycoons, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story 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 riches is contrary to fundamental decency, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
However, for some reason, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a public shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — certainly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and importance, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
If anything, it appears that the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of real-world action. Provided with a frequent serving of largely uplifting tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These films are like ethical parables, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more targeted, and seemingly more fatal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, possibly since it’s become so clear that rich people operate under different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exclusions
There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses 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
