A familiar idea courses through a host of 2025's popular films. This notion that stretches all the way back to the time of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul spending vast sums to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while employing deepfakes and a sophisticated media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the tough residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding appetite for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era 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 replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Every time elected officials follow a public shooting event by blaming violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — surely American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the daily reports demonstrates regularly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after decades of history's most popular movies promoting the reverse.
Actually, it seems like the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that impedes meaningful change. Provided with a steady diet of mostly triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away satisfied about justice being served. These films are like cautionary fables, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they do follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more direct, and seemingly more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money 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 colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, possibly since it’s become so clear that rich people live by a separate justice system, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exceptions
Some films diverge, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
