A familiar idea runs through numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes far back to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people living in desperate poverty, while using deepfakes and a sophisticated smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, contrasts the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Even, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is at odds with fundamental decency, and exalt the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. Whenever politicians respond to a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates regularly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.
Actually, it appears that the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a regular dose of mostly uplifting fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away satisfied about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will root out any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more targeted, and seemingly more lethal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people learn a useful 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, greedy, hateful wealthy people were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so clear that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
