A recurring idea courses through many of 2025's popular films. This concept that stretches back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Tradition of Film Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its villains live in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, pits the resourceful residents of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, naturally.
It is not inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept dates back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against tycoons, authority figures, 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 greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is at odds with fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Alters Little
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a public shooting event by blaming graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the news reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously equate riches with intelligence and social worth, 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 given us a pressure release that hinders meaningful change. Offered a regular dose of largely triumphant tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, suggesting that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more direct, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exclusions
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
