A recurring theme permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Film Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its villains live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit extravagant gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Interestingly, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to cause planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
There’s nothing especially new in a series of movies presupposing that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against fat cats, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is contrary to fundamental decency, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials follow a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. And yet the daily reports reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and importance, even after decades of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that impedes real-world action. Provided with a regular dose of predominantly uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These films are like ethical parables, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more direct, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson 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, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so clear that rich people live by a separate justice system, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Outliers
There are exceptions, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
