An age-old motif runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends back in time to the time of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to defame Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated media apparatus to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its villains live in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, contrasts the tough people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — for his own profit, of course.
It is not inherently notable in a string of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept dates back to the early days of film, with early comedies setting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, 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 revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Whenever lawmakers react to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the daily reports demonstrates regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
Actually, it appears that the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film feeling good about good conquering evil. These stories are like cautionary fables, suggesting that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more targeted, and seemingly more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car finale, possibly since it’s become so clear that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exceptions
Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
