A recurring motif courses through many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes back in time to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to throw the heroes into a monster-filled death trap to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Film Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, sets the resourceful people of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Remarkably, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — to make money, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies presupposing that rich people have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies 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" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Release That Changes Nothing
However, for some reason, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion elected officials react to a public shooting event by blaming graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — surely American society would not continue to revere billionaires. And yet the news reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies conveying a contradictory message.
In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders meaningful change. Offered a regular dose of mostly triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away feeling good about good conquering evil. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more direct, and seemingly more fatal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car ending, possibly since it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the digital realm, 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 reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
