An age-old idea courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro squandering tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, contrasts the resourceful people of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, naturally.
It is not especially new in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against fat cats, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. From 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 exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Alters Little
However, somehow, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers react to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — surely American society would not continue to worship billionaires. Still the daily reports reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously link affluence to competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting the reverse.
Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Provided with a steady diet of largely uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like cautionary fables, pretending that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will root out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more specific, and seemingly more fatal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, 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 affluent villains were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, likely due to it’s become so clear that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exclusions
There are exceptions, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
