A familiar idea courses through many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends far back to the days 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 orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro investing tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of On-Screen Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality quite that directly, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, sets the tough inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent sky-high mansions in the sky. Even, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, naturally.
There is little inherently notable in a string of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Release That Alters Little
And yet, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Every time politicians react to a new mass shooting event by blaming violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. Still the headlines makes it obvious constantly that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and social worth, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that impedes real-world action. Given a steady diet of largely uplifting fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will identify any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more specific, and apparently more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, 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, selfish, cruel affluent villains were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
