A recurring motif courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends far back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people living in extreme hardship, while employing AI forgeries and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, contrasts the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent sky-high mansions above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to cause worldwide catastrophe — to make money, of course.
There is little inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, 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 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 presume that wealth is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Release That Alters Little
However, inexplicably, we never actually eating the rich. On each occasion elected officials respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — certainly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates constantly that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with competence and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating a contradictory message.
Actually, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that hinders real-world action. Given a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like ethical parables, pretending that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more targeted, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson 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, 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 blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
