A familiar motif courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches far back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing vast sums to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people living in extreme hardship, while using AI forgeries and a well-honed propaganda machine to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its antagonists enjoy conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the resourceful residents of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that rich people have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is contrary to core morality, and exalt the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
And yet, somehow, we never get around to eating the rich. Whenever elected officials follow a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the headlines reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to competence and importance, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting the reverse.
If anything, it appears that the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that impedes substantive reform. Provided with a steady diet of mostly uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will identify any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and apparently more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory 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 oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy live by different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exclusions
Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
