A familiar motif permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, all for their own profit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its antagonists enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, pits the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, naturally.
It is not inherently notable in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged desire for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against fat cats, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians respond to a public shooting event by blaming graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the news reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.
Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that impedes substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of predominantly happily-ever-after stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like ethical parables, implying that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more specific, and seemingly more fatal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car ending, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that the wealthy function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Outliers
Some films diverge, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
