An age-old idea permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through desperate poverty, while using AI forgeries and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains live in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them out of jobs and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to cause worldwide catastrophe — to make money, of course.
It is not particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that rich people have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his always poor beloved underdog against fat cats, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. From 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 tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
And yet, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion lawmakers follow a public shooting event by blaming graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. And yet the news demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after decades of history's most popular movies promoting the opposite.
If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes meaningful change. Offered a steady diet of largely triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away satisfied about good conquering evil. These stories are like cautionary fables, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more direct, and seemingly more fatal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car finale, possibly since it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Outliers
Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
