A familiar motif runs through a host of 2025's popular films. It's an idea that stretches far back to the days of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while employing digital impersonations and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight economic inequality quite that directly, but its evil characters enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the resourceful inhabitants of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in lavish gleaming towers in the sky. Even, the zany farcical update of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
It is not inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with 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 rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
However, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Every time elected officials follow a public shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. Still the daily reports demonstrates regularly that a significant portion of Americans innately equate riches with smartness and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.
Actually, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of meaningful change. Offered a regular dose of predominantly uplifting fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A Sharper Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more specific, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, 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 killed by legendary creatures (*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 point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, possibly since it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. 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 revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
