An age-old motif permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes far back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to defame Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to throw the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its evil characters live in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them into unemployment and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the tough inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who live in lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.
It is not particularly surprising in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding hunger for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept dates back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, industrialists, and clueless rich men. 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 tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and applaud the defusing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers follow a tragic gun violence event by blaming graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. Still the headlines reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans innately equate riches with smartness and social worth, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a steady diet of predominantly happily-ever-after stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film satisfied about good conquering evil. These films are like cautionary fables, suggesting that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car finale, likely due to it’s become so clear that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exclusions
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
