A familiar idea courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends back in time to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a sophisticated propaganda machine to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity quite that directly, but its antagonists live in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, contrasts the tough residents of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the zany humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to trigger worldwide catastrophe — to make money, naturally.
There is little inherently notable in a run of movies presupposing that rich people have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding appetite for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against tycoons, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, downfall, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
However, inexplicably, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion lawmakers follow a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society would not continue to revere billionaires. But the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a frequent serving of mostly happily-ever-after tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, suggesting that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and seemingly more violent. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays 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 oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*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 shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exceptions
There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, 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 Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
