A familiar idea courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes back in time to the days of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them into unemployment and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the scrappy residents of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Even, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, naturally.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his always poor beloved underdog against corporate bosses, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is at odds with fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Fails to Transform
However, somehow, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Whenever elected officials respond to a new mass shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. Still the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans innately equate riches with competence and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that impedes meaningful change. Given a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about good conquering evil. These films are like ethical parables, implying that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more targeted, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people gain some humility in humility, 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 rich individuals were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car ending, perhaps because it’s become so clear that affluent individuals operate under their own legal rules, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
