A familiar idea runs through a host of 2025's popular films. It's an idea which extends back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to defame Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its villains reside in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, contrasts the resourceful people of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept dates back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Release That Alters Little
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Whenever politicians follow a new mass shooting 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 cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. But the headlines makes it obvious every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively equate riches with smartness and value to society, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies conveying the reverse.
In fact, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that impedes substantive reform. Offered a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These movies are like ethical parables, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will root out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more direct, and seemingly more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car finale, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exclusions
Some films diverge, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
