A recurring theme courses through many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches all the way back to the days of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his immense fortune to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering tens of millions to cast the heroes into a monster-filled arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and framed her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring extreme hardship, while employing deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality quite that directly, but its evil characters reside in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, pits the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in extravagant sky-high mansions above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.
There is little particularly surprising in a string of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged desire for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. 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 exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the defusing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. But the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively equate riches with intelligence and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies conveying a contradictory message.
If anything, it appears that the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes meaningful change. Provided with a frequent serving of largely triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will root out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It’s rarely enough these days 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, selfish, cruel affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car ending, likely due to it’s become so clear that rich people live by a separate justice system, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind 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* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
