A familiar motif permeates numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that stretches all the way back to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to defame Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to trap the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and framed her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed propaganda machine to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity as overtly, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy residents of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in extravagant gleaming towers above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — to make money, naturally.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for greater riches. "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 pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Every time politicians react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after decades of history's most popular movies promoting a contradictory message.
If anything, it seems like the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders real-world action. Given a regular dose of mostly uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away satisfied about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more specific, and apparently more fatal. It’s rarely enough these days 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 oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so clear that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Outliers
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the computer world, 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 revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
