An age-old theme runs through numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul spending tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while using digital impersonations and a powerful propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its villains live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, pits the tough people of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who live in opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, naturally.
There is little inherently notable in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept dates back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. 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 entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to fundamental decency, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Whenever elected officials react to a public shooting event by faulting graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. But the headlines makes it obvious constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately equate riches with competence and importance, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies conveying the reverse.
If anything, it appears that the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders real-world action. Given a steady diet of mostly happily-ever-after fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will root out any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they do follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more direct, and seemingly more lethal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people be taught a lesson 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, greedy, hateful rich individuals were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, possibly since it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exclusions
A few stories differ, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. 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 unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
