A recurring motif permeates a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that goes back in time to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to defame Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering tens of millions to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people suffering through abject destitution, while using deepfakes and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its antagonists enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, pits the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Interestingly, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.
It is not especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to fundamental decency, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials react to a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the news reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a steady diet of mostly happily-ever-after fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away satisfied about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more specific, 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 forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*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 directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals live by different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to die at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Outliers
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. 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 revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
