A familiar idea courses through many of 2025's popular films. This notion that goes all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while employing AI forgeries and a sophisticated propaganda machine to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them from their homes and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the scrappy residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who live in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to cause planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.
It is not inherently notable in a series of movies presupposing that rich people have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of mostly happily-ever-after fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will identify any corrupt individuals among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more targeted, and seemingly more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so clear that rich people function with different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exclusions
A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the computer world, teasing that he is 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 antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
