An age-old idea courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends all the way back to the era of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a rich antagonist operating a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people living in extreme hardship, while using deepfakes and a well-honed smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality quite that directly, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them from their homes and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the resourceful inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to cause worldwide catastrophe — to make money, of course.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Every time elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to intelligence and social worth, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.
Actually, it appears that the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that gets in the way of meaningful change. Provided with a regular dose of mostly happily-ever-after fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about good conquering evil. These films are like cautionary fables, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will identify any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and apparently more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals live by a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Exceptions
There are exceptions, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
