A recurring theme courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes far back to the days of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while employing digital impersonations and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains live in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the resourceful inhabitants of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions above the clouds. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to cause planetary doom — to make money, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies presupposing that rich people have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept dates back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against tycoons, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the defusing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion politicians follow a tragic gun violence event by blaming graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously link affluence to competence and social worth, even after a century of history's most popular movies promoting the opposite.
Actually, it appears that the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that impedes substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of mostly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like ethical parables, implying that the system works, and that determined protagonists will root out any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals live by their own legal rules, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exclusions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
