A recurring idea runs through a host of 2025's popular films. This notion that goes far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while using digital impersonations and a well-honed smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *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, driving them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, pits the tough residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in lavish sky-high mansions floating overhead. Even, the zany humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to trigger worldwide catastrophe — to make money, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, for some reason, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Every time lawmakers react to a new mass shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people truly 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 continue to idolize billionaires. And yet the news reveals constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with competence and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating a contradictory message.
In fact, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that hinders meaningful change. Provided with a regular dose of mostly uplifting tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away satisfied about good conquering evil. These stories are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more direct, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient 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 oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to die at the final act of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exceptions
There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
