An age-old motif permeates many of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about economic inequality as overtly, but its evil characters enjoy conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them into unemployment and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, sets the tough people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — to make money, needless to say.
It is not especially new in a string of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we never actually consuming the elite. Whenever politicians react to a tragic gun violence event by blaming graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. Still the headlines reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively equate riches with intelligence and importance, even after decades of history's most popular movies promoting the opposite.
If anything, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders meaningful change. Given a regular dose of largely happily-ever-after stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These stories are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will identify any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they indeed follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people gain some humility 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, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy live by a separate justice system, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exclusions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. 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 culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
