A recurring theme courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This notion that stretches far back to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro investing vast sums to trap the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while using deepfakes and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality quite that directly, but its antagonists live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, pits the tough residents of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit opulent sky-high mansions floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to cause worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a string of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against fat cats, authority figures, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. Whenever elected officials react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies promoting the reverse.
In fact, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes real-world action. Provided with a steady diet of predominantly triumphant stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These stories are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and seemingly more violent. It is no longer satisfactory 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 exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the virtual grid, 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 redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
