A familiar motif courses through a host of 2025's popular films. This concept which extends all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his vast wealth to smear Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing tens of millions to trap the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, all for their own profit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people suffering through extreme hardship, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful media apparatus to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its villains live in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to trigger worldwide catastrophe — to make money, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is at odds with basic human values, and applaud the defusing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians follow a public shooting 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 — surely American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. But the daily reports reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and value to society, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies conveying a contradictory message.
If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of largely happily-ever-after tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These movies are like ethical parables, suggesting that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more targeted, and apparently more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, 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 shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Exceptions
There are exceptions, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
