A familiar motif permeates a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that stretches far back to the time of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro investing vast sums to trap the heroes into a monster-filled arena for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while employing digital impersonations and a powerful propaganda machine to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division as overtly, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, contrasts the resourceful inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to cause worldwide catastrophe — to make money, needless to say.
There is little inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Alters Little
Nevertheless, somehow, we never get around to consuming the elite. Whenever lawmakers respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the daily reports makes it obvious constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously equate riches with intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting a contradictory message.
Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that impedes real-world action. Offered a frequent serving of largely uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving 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 modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more targeted, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, 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, greedy, hateful affluent villains were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the final act of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exclusions
A few stories differ, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
