🔗 Share this article

A recurring theme courses through numerous 2025's popular films. It's an idea that goes all the way back to the time of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro investing tens of millions to throw the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.

A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its evil characters reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, sets the tough residents of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in extravagant sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, of course.

There is little inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that rich people have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies setting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is at odds with core morality, and exalt the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.

The Release That Fails to Transform

And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the news reveals regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to competence and social worth, even after a century of history's most popular movies promoting the opposite.

Actually, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that impedes substantive reform. Provided with a steady diet of largely happily-ever-after stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away content about good conquering evil. These films are like ethical parables, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.

An Angrier Edge in 2025

But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era 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 subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, possibly since it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals operate under their own legal rules, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."

The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.

Significant Exceptions

There are exceptions, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, where he’s clearly 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 revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid