A familiar motif courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This notion that stretches far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful propaganda machine to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists enjoy conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, pits the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, naturally.
It is not especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his always poor Little Tramp character against tycoons, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is contrary to core morality, and applaud the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
However, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by faulting graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. Still the daily reports reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies conveying a contradictory message.
If anything, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that hinders real-world action. Provided with a frequent serving of largely happily-ever-after stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about justice being served. These movies are like cautionary fables, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more direct, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, 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 fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with a separate justice system, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exclusions
Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
