A recurring motif courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion that stretches back in time to the era of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and framed her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through extreme hardship, while using AI forgeries and a well-honed propaganda machine to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity quite that directly, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, contrasts the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy farcical update of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to cause worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a series of movies presupposing that rich people have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his always poor beloved underdog against fat cats, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
However, somehow, we never actually consuming the elite. On each occasion politicians respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. Still the news demonstrates regularly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting a contradictory message.
Actually, it seems like the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Provided with a frequent serving of predominantly triumphant tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away feeling good about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more targeted, and apparently more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals operate under a separate justice system, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exceptions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
