A familiar idea courses through numerous 2025's popular films. This notion which extends back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering tens of millions to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the tough residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the lighthearted farcical update of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — for financial gain, naturally.
There is little especially new in a string of movies presupposing that rich people have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, 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 a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to fundamental decency, and exalt the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
However, somehow, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time politicians react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders substantive reform. Offered a frequent serving of mostly triumphant fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater content about good conquering evil. These movies are like cautionary fables, suggesting that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more targeted, and apparently more lethal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exceptions
There are exceptions, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
