A familiar idea runs through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion which extends back in time to the era of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to defame Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated propaganda machine to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Interestingly, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — to make money, naturally.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
However, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion elected officials respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the daily reports reveals regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously equate riches with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.
In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of largely triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about good conquering evil. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will identify any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more targeted, and seemingly more violent. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car finale, likely due to it’s become so clear that affluent individuals live by a separate justice system, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
