A familiar theme permeates numerous 2025's popular films. This notion that goes far back to the time of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a rich antagonist running a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through desperate poverty, while using deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the resourceful people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who live in lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to cause global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
There is little inherently notable in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged desire for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Fails to Transform
However, for some reason, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — surely American society would not continue to revere billionaires. Still the headlines makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with competence and importance, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting a contradictory message.
Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that impedes substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of largely happily-ever-after tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will root out any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more lethal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era 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 subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed 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 gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people live by different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
