An age-old idea courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends all the way back to the era of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its evil characters enjoy conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, pits the tough people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Interestingly, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
It is not especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding appetite for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme dates back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
Nevertheless, for some reason, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Every time elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the headlines makes it obvious constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously equate riches with intelligence and importance, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies conveying the reverse.
In fact, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that impedes real-world action. Provided with a steady diet of mostly happily-ever-after fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away satisfied about good conquering evil. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will root out any malicious actors among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more direct, and apparently more lethal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals live by different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exclusions
A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
