A recurring motif courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul spending vast sums to trap the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division as overtly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them out of jobs and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the resourceful people of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit extravagant gleaming towers floating overhead. Remarkably, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — to make money, of course.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled desire for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme dates back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against tycoons, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is incompatible with basic human values, and exalt the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Alters Little
And yet, somehow, we never actually consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials follow a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious constantly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.
In fact, it appears that the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a frequent serving of mostly happily-ever-after tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film content about right prevailing. These stories are like cautionary fables, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, possibly since it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the final act of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exceptions
Some films diverge, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
