A familiar theme runs through numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion that stretches far back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people suffering through extreme hardship, while using AI forgeries and a sophisticated media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the resourceful people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Even, the zany comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — for his own profit, naturally.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a series of movies taking it as a given that rich people have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding appetite for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, 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 exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Alters Little
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. On each occasion lawmakers react to a public shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates regularly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies promoting the opposite.
If anything, it appears that the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders real-world action. Provided with a steady diet of mostly triumphant stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These films are like ethical parables, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will identify any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more specific, and apparently more fatal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people gain some humility 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, greedy, hateful affluent villains were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, likely due to it’s become so clear that affluent individuals operate under a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Outliers
There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
