A familiar motif courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to defame Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul investing tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people suffering through abject destitution, while employing digital impersonations and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, pits the tough people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who live in extravagant sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the lighthearted humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the early days of film, with early comedies setting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against fat cats, authority figures, 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 that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
And yet, somehow, we never actually consuming the elite. Whenever elected officials respond to a tragic gun violence event by faulting popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and social worth, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies promoting the reverse.
Actually, it seems like the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a regular dose of mostly happily-ever-after tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more specific, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson 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 killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people live by a separate justice system, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Outliers
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. 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 revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
