A recurring idea courses through a host of 2025's popular films. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to smear Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering tens of millions to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while using AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the resourceful residents of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Even, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — to make money, naturally.
There is little especially new in a string of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged desire for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept dates back to the early days of film, with early comedies contrasting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Release That Alters Little
Nevertheless, somehow, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Whenever politicians follow a new mass shooting event by blaming violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. Still the news demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.
In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that hinders real-world action. Given a regular dose of predominantly uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film satisfied about good conquering evil. These movies are like cautionary fables, implying that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more targeted, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era 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 oppressed, 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 enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals operate under their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the virtual grid, 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 redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
