A familiar motif permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes all the way back to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to throw the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while using deepfakes and a powerful propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about economic inequality quite that directly, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, of course.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning 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 rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is contrary to core morality, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Every time politicians respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
If anything, it appears that the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of predominantly triumphant tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like cautionary fables, implying that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more targeted, and seemingly more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to perish at the end of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Outliers
There are exceptions, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the virtual grid, 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 redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
