An age-old idea permeates many of 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes far back to the days 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 orchestrating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul squandering a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist operating a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through abject destitution, while employing digital impersonations and a well-honed media apparatus to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its villains enjoy clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them out of jobs and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to core morality, and exalt the defusing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never actually eating the rich. Every time elected officials follow a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the daily reports reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after decades of history's most popular movies conveying the opposite.
If anything, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a steady diet of predominantly uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like ethical parables, implying that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they indeed follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy live by different standards, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the final act of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exceptions
A few stories differ, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the digital realm, teasing that he is 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 thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
