A familiar motif courses through a host of 2025's popular films. This concept that stretches back in time to the time of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a sophisticated propaganda machine to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Even, the agreeably goofy farcical update of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to cause planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.
It is not particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding hunger for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the defusing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Alters Little
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Whenever lawmakers react to a new mass shooting event by blaming violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and importance, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies communicating a contradictory message.
If anything, it seems like the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that impedes meaningful change. Given a steady diet of mostly triumphant stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will weed out any corrupt individuals among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they indeed follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more specific, and seemingly more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, possibly since it’s become so clear that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. 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 culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
