A familiar idea permeates many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes back in time to the time of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through extreme hardship, while employing AI forgeries and a sophisticated media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its evil characters reside in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them into unemployment and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, sets the resourceful people of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions floating overhead. Even, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger worldwide catastrophe — to make money, of course.
It is not especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that rich people have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, bosses, 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 revised a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we never get around to eating the rich. Every time politicians follow a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — certainly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. But the news reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after decades of history's most popular movies conveying the opposite.
In fact, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a regular dose of largely uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they indeed follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car ending, possibly since it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by a separate justice system, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exceptions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
