An age-old theme runs through a host of 2025's popular films. It's an idea that goes far back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his immense fortune to smear Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul spending a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists reside in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Remarkably, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to cause global armageddon — to make money, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding desire for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor beloved underdog against fat cats, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, somehow, we never actually eating the rich. Every time elected officials follow a new mass shooting event by blaming graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. Still the daily reports makes it obvious every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and social worth, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of largely uplifting tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about justice being served. These movies are like cautionary fables, implying that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will root out any malicious actors among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more direct, and apparently more fatal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, possibly since it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by different standards, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled 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 redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
