An age-old idea permeates many of 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches far back to the time of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his immense fortune to smear Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to trap the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while using digital impersonations and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a series of movies assuming as fact that rich people have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
However, for some reason, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever politicians react to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. Still the headlines reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies conveying a contradictory message.
If anything, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes meaningful change. Provided with a regular dose of predominantly triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more direct, and observably more lethal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were eliminated 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 gunned down point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy function with a separate justice system, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Outliers
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
