A familiar motif courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes back in time to the time of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear 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 trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated media apparatus to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, pits the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — to make money, of course.
There’s nothing especially new in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding hunger for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against fat cats, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Outlet That Alters Little
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never actually consuming the elite. Whenever politicians follow a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately equate riches with smartness and social worth, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies communicating a contradictory message.
If anything, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that gets in the way of meaningful change. Offered a steady diet of predominantly uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away satisfied about good conquering evil. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more direct, and seemingly more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, 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 colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people function with a separate justice system, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the final act of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exceptions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the digital realm, 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 exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
