A familiar idea permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering tens of millions to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring extreme hardship, while employing digital impersonations and a powerful propaganda machine to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, sets the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in lavish gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the zany humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against fat cats, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the defusing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Fails to Transform
However, inexplicably, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. Still the headlines demonstrates constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously equate riches with smartness and importance, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that impedes real-world action. Given a regular dose of mostly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more specific, and seemingly more violent. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
