A recurring theme permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes back in time to the time of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro investing vast sums to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, pits the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.
It is not inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against fat cats, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is at odds with fundamental decency, and applaud the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Whenever politicians follow a public shooting event by blaming graphic media, 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 societal mindset — certainly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a significant portion of Americans innately equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.
Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that impedes substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of largely uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These movies are like cautionary fables, suggesting that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will root out any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more specific, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, likely due to it’s become so clear that the wealthy live by different standards, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the computer world, a setup that obviously 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 revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
