An age-old idea courses through a host of 2025's popular films. This concept that goes far back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of On-Screen Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about wealth disparity as overtly, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, pits the resourceful inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who live in opulent gleaming towers above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged desire for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against fat cats, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. 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 Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to core morality, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time lawmakers respond to a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. Still the headlines reveals every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and social worth, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies conveying the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that gets in the way of meaningful change. Offered a regular dose of predominantly triumphant tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about justice being served. These films are like ethical parables, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will identify any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more direct, and seemingly more lethal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people be taught a 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, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car ending, possibly since it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to perish at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exclusions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. 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 thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
