An age-old motif courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion that stretches back in time to the days of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its antagonists live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent sky-high mansions above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.
There is little particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that the affluent have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
And yet, somehow, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Whenever politicians follow a tragic gun violence event by faulting popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. But the news demonstrates constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that impedes meaningful change. Given a regular dose of largely uplifting fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away satisfied about justice being served. These stories are like cautionary fables, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more targeted, and observably 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 oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*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 killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, possibly since it’s become so clear that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Exclusions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
