An age-old idea permeates many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes back in time to the time of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to defame Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity quite that directly, but its evil characters enjoy conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, sets the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in extravagant gleaming towers above the clouds. Even, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — to make money, naturally.
There is little inherently notable in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding appetite for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against fat cats, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time elected officials respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. But the daily reports makes it obvious every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively equate riches with smartness and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting the reverse.
If anything, it appears that the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that hinders substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of largely triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they do follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, 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 rich individuals were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under different standards, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
