🔗 Share this article

A familiar idea permeates many 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 villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending tens of millions to throw the heroes into a monster-filled arena for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.

A Legacy 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 enduring extreme hardship, while using AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, sets the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, naturally.

There is little inherently notable in a string of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is incompatible with fundamental decency, and applaud the defusing, defeat, and sometimes demise of elite figures.

The Outlet That Changes Nothing

However, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion lawmakers follow a tragic gun violence event by blaming popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously equate riches with competence and importance, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.

Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Provided with a steady diet of largely uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will identify any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.

A More Pointed Edge in 2025

Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more specific, and seemingly more fatal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people learn a useful 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, greedy, hateful wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).

"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."

The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.

Key Outliers

Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses 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