A recurring motif courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes far back to the time of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro investing tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while using AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to cause planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against corporate bosses, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Every time politicians react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the news reveals every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies conveying a contradictory message.
Actually, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of predominantly happily-ever-after fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will root out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they indeed follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more direct, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, likely due to it’s become so clear that rich people function with a separate justice system, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to die at the final act of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
