A familiar motif runs through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that goes all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people living in desperate poverty, while using deepfakes and a sophisticated media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, contrasts the scrappy inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to bring about global armageddon — to make money, of course.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a series of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding hunger for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against fat cats, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Release That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever politicians react to a tragic gun violence event by blaming graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. But the news reveals every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with smartness and social worth, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies promoting a contradictory message.
If anything, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes real-world action. Provided with a regular dose of largely happily-ever-after fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about good conquering evil. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more specific, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to die at the final act of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exclusions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
