A familiar idea runs through numerous 2025's popular films. It's an idea that stretches back in time to the time of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to defame Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while employing digital impersonations and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity as overtly, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, pits the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy farcical update of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.
It is not particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies setting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, somehow, we never actually eating the rich. Whenever lawmakers respond to a public shooting event by faulting graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. Still the headlines reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans innately link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after a century of history's most popular movies conveying the opposite.
Actually, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a regular dose of predominantly triumphant stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These films are like ethical parables, implying that the system works, and that determined protagonists will root out any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more direct, and seemingly more fatal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to die at the final act of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends 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* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
