A recurring idea courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains live in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the resourceful residents of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in opulent sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a series of movies assuming as fact that rich people have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged desire for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme dates back to the early days of film, with early comedies contrasting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, 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 packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is contrary to basic human values, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Alters Little
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never actually eating the rich. Every time politicians follow a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. Still the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously link affluence to competence and social worth, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.
If anything, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Offered a frequent serving of largely triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about good conquering evil. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more targeted, and apparently 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 be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by different standards, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exclusions
Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid