An age-old motif courses through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that goes far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul squandering vast sums to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated propaganda machine to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to basic human values, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
However, for some reason, we never actually consuming the elite. On each occasion politicians respond to a new mass shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — certainly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the daily reports reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies promoting the opposite.
If anything, it seems like the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes meaningful change. Given a frequent serving of largely uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about good conquering evil. These films are like ethical parables, suggesting that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they do follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more violent. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, possibly since it’s become so obvious that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exclusions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
