An age-old idea runs through many of 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends far back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to defame Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul squandering tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its evil characters reside in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the lighthearted farcical update of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to cause planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
It is not especially new in a string of movies presupposing that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged desire for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept dates back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his always poor beloved underdog against fat cats, bosses, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to fundamental decency, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
And yet, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials respond to a public shooting event by faulting graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. But the headlines makes it obvious regularly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and importance, even after a century of history's most popular movies conveying the opposite.
In fact, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that impedes substantive reform. Given a steady diet of largely happily-ever-after fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film content about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will identify any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they do follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more specific, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough 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 oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were eliminated 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 point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, possibly since it’s become so clear that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to perish at the final act of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exclusions
A few stories differ, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
