A recurring theme courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes far back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them into unemployment and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the tough residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Interestingly, the zany comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to cause worldwide catastrophe — to make money, needless to say.
It is not particularly surprising in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have disproportionate control, 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 birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers react to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — surely American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious every single day that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously link affluence to smartness and importance, even after decades of history's most popular movies promoting a contradictory message.
If anything, it seems like the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that impedes real-world action. Given a steady diet of largely triumphant fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that the system works, and that determined protagonists will root out any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail finale, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that rich people live by a separate justice system, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exceptions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits 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
