A familiar motif runs through numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro squandering tens of millions to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people living in abject destitution, while using deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its villains enjoy clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to bring about worldwide catastrophe — to make money, naturally.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Starting 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 whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Alters Little
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers react to a new mass shooting event by blaming graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. Still the headlines reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously equate riches with smartness and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies conveying the opposite.
Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of mostly happily-ever-after stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will identify any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more targeted, and apparently more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Outliers
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses 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
