A familiar motif permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches far back to the time of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul squandering tens of millions to throw the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the tough people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in extravagant gleaming towers floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
It is not inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the defusing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. But the headlines makes it obvious constantly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.
In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes meaningful change. Provided with a steady diet of predominantly uplifting tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These stories are like cautionary fables, suggesting that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more specific, and seemingly more violent. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death 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 conclusion, possibly since it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under different standards, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Outliers
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
