A recurring theme permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a rich antagonist running a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people living in extreme hardship, while employing deepfakes and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its antagonists reside in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, contrasts the resourceful inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the lighthearted humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to cause planetary doom — to make money, of course.
There’s nothing especially new in a string of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Release That Alters Little
However, inexplicably, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Whenever politicians follow a new mass shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. But the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies conveying the opposite.
Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a frequent serving of mostly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about good conquering evil. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will identify any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more direct, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson 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, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals live by different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
