An age-old idea runs through many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his vast wealth to smear Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering vast sums to throw the heroes into a monster-filled arena for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them from their homes and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, contrasts the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.
There is little particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that the affluent have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Alters Little
However, somehow, we never actually eating the rich. Every time elected officials follow a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. Still the daily reports makes it obvious every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies conveying the reverse.
If anything, it appears that the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a regular dose of largely triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away feeling good about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel 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’s rarely enough these days to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, 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 wealthy people were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses 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
