A familiar motif permeates many of 2025's popular films. It's an idea that goes back in time to the era of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to smear Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul investing tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric death trap to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a sophisticated propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its evil characters enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them out of jobs and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Interestingly, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a string of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is contrary to core morality, and exalt the defusing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, somehow, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Whenever lawmakers follow a new mass shooting event by faulting graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. But the news reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans innately equate riches with smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying a contradictory message.
If anything, it appears that the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Offered a frequent serving of mostly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away satisfied about good conquering evil. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will identify any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more specific, and observably more lethal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, 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, greedy, hateful wealthy people were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, possibly since it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals live by different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exclusions
A few stories differ, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
