A recurring motif courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul squandering vast sums to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed propaganda machine to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, sets the tough people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in extravagant gleaming towers floating overhead. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.
There is little inherently notable in a series of movies presupposing that the affluent have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding desire for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against tycoons, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning 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 complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with basic human values, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, for some reason, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion politicians react to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. But the daily reports reveals regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately link affluence to competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies conveying the opposite.
Actually, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes real-world action. Provided with a frequent serving of mostly uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they do follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more direct, and observably more violent. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, 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, greedy, hateful affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, perhaps because it’s become so clear that the wealthy function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
