A familiar motif courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes back in time to the era of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to throw the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful propaganda machine to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division quite that directly, but its villains live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them into unemployment and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, sets the resourceful residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gleaming towers floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, needless to say.
It is not especially new in a string of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against tycoons, 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 exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is at odds with fundamental decency, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
However, for some reason, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Whenever politicians respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society would not continue to revere billionaires. Still the headlines reveals constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a frequent serving of mostly triumphant tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film content about justice being served. These movies are like ethical parables, implying that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will identify any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more fatal. It is seldom sufficient 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 subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail finale, perhaps because it’s become so clear that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exceptions
Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined 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
