A recurring theme runs through many of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes far back to the era of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to trap the heroes into a monster-filled death trap to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while employing AI forgeries and a sophisticated media apparatus to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, pits the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, of course.
There is little inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged desire for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we never actually consuming the elite. Whenever politicians react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. Still the news demonstrates regularly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a steady diet of mostly happily-ever-after tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These films are like cautionary fables, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will root out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more targeted, and seemingly more violent. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to perish at the final act of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exceptions
There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
