An age-old idea courses through many of 2025's popular films. It's an idea that stretches all the way back to the time of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a sophisticated propaganda machine to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality quite that directly, but its antagonists live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.
There is little especially new in a string of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Beginning 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 exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to fundamental decency, and applaud the defusing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Every time elected officials follow a public shooting event by blaming graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — surely American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. But the daily reports reveals regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to competence and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.
If anything, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that impedes substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of largely triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These movies are like ethical parables, suggesting that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more direct, and seemingly more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, possibly since it’s become so clear that rich people live by different standards, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
