An age-old idea runs through numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes far back to the era of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, pits the resourceful inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Even, the zany farcical update of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — for his own profit, of course.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his always poor Little Tramp character against tycoons, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is at odds with core morality, and applaud the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials follow a public shooting event by blaming 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 — surely American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes real-world action. Provided with a frequent serving of largely triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away feeling good about good conquering evil. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will identify any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more targeted, and seemingly more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, 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, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so clear that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Outliers
Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined 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 redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
