An age-old theme courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches back in time to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his immense fortune to defame Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul spending tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while employing digital impersonations and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its evil characters live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, sets the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit opulent gleaming towers above the clouds. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a string of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting 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" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Alters Little
And yet, somehow, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. On each occasion lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with smartness and importance, even after decades of history's most popular movies conveying the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that impedes real-world action. Given a regular dose of predominantly triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that the system works, and that determined protagonists will root out any malicious actors among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more targeted, and seemingly more violent. It’s rarely enough in the current era 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, greedy, hateful wealthy people were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, possibly since it’s become so apparent that rich people function with a separate justice system, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exclusions
Some films diverge, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the digital realm, teasing that he is 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 antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
