A recurring motif runs through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that goes all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his vast wealth to defame Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people living in extreme hardship, while employing digital impersonations and a well-honed smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, sets the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent gleaming towers floating overhead. Interestingly, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to bring about worldwide catastrophe — to make money, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged desire for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his always poor Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to fundamental decency, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and importance, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies conveying a contradictory message.
Actually, it appears that the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders real-world action. Given a regular dose of mostly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and apparently more fatal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, possibly since it’s become so apparent that rich people function with a separate justice system, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly 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 antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
