A recurring motif courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion that stretches back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering tens of millions to cast the heroes into a monster-filled arena for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality as overtly, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, pits the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.
It is not especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against fat cats, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is contrary to fundamental decency, and celebrate the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time politicians respond to a tragic gun violence event by faulting popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — certainly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates regularly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies promoting the reverse.
If anything, it looks as though the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a regular dose of mostly triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These movies are like cautionary fables, suggesting that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will weed out any malicious actors among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune 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 devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, possibly since it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Outliers
There are exceptions, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. 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 exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
