A familiar motif permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes all the way back to the days of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, sets the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in opulent sky-high mansions floating overhead. Even, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, for some reason, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers follow a tragic gun violence event by blaming graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the headlines makes it obvious every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies promoting the reverse.
Actually, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of largely happily-ever-after stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more direct, and apparently more lethal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exclusions
A few stories differ, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, 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 transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
