A familiar theme courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes back in time to the era of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his immense fortune to defame Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul squandering tens of millions to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Film Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people enduring extreme hardship, while employing AI forgeries and a sophisticated smear campaign to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists reside in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them from their homes and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, pits the tough people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who live in extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Even, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.
There’s nothing particularly surprising 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 more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against fat cats, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
However, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies conveying the opposite.
Actually, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of mostly triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about good conquering evil. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more specific, and observably more violent. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, possibly since it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Outliers
There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply 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* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
