A familiar motif permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Tradition of Film Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people living in extreme hardship, while employing deepfakes and a sophisticated media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about wealth disparity as overtly, but its evil characters reside in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the resourceful people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding appetite for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against corporate bosses, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with 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 rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is at odds with fundamental decency, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, somehow, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion lawmakers follow a public shooting event by blaming graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. But the news makes it obvious every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and value to society, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies promoting a contradictory message.
If anything, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes meaningful change. Given a regular dose of largely uplifting fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that determined protagonists will root out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they indeed follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and seemingly 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 rich individuals were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, possibly since it’s become so clear that rich people live by different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exclusions
There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself 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 redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
