An age-old idea courses through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that stretches back in time to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated propaganda machine to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists reside in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the tough people of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit opulent sky-high mansions above the clouds. Remarkably, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.
It is not especially new in a string of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, 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 refreshed that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is at odds with basic human values, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. Still the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies promoting the reverse.
If anything, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that impedes real-world action. Given a regular dose of mostly triumphant tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and apparently more violent. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exceptions
There are exceptions, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
