An age-old theme runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated smear campaign to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them into unemployment and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to cause global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.
It is not particularly surprising in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding desire for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
However, inexplicably, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. Still the news demonstrates regularly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously equate riches with competence and importance, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies promoting a contradictory message.
In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a steady diet of largely happily-ever-after fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater content about good conquering evil. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will identify any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more direct, and observably more violent. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so clear that the wealthy live by different standards, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the final act of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Outliers
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* finds himself banished to the computer world, where he’s clearly 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 wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
