A familiar motif runs through numerous 2025's popular films. It's an idea that goes far back to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to smear Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled arena for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Film Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the tough residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.
There is little especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Release That Alters Little
However, somehow, we never get around to consuming the elite. Whenever lawmakers respond to a tragic gun violence event by blaming graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the daily reports demonstrates regularly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with smartness and importance, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies conveying the reverse.
If anything, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that hinders meaningful change. Provided with a frequent serving of largely triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will root out any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they do follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more targeted, and apparently more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, perhaps because it’s become so clear that rich people live by different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Outliers
There are exceptions, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
