An age-old idea courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends back in time to the days of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a sophisticated smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity quite that directly, but its antagonists live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, contrasts the resourceful residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to cause planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies presupposing that rich people have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Every time elected officials respond to a tragic gun violence event by blaming graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a steady diet of predominantly uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about justice being served. These films are like ethical parables, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will identify any corrupt individuals among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more direct, and observably more violent. 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 wealthy people were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, possibly since it’s become so clear that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to perish at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exceptions
Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. 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
