A familiar idea runs through many of 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes all the way back to the time of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending tens of millions to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about wealth disparity as overtly, but its evil characters reside in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them into unemployment and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to cause worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, needless to say.
It is not especially new in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, and clueless rich men. 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 tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is at odds with fundamental decency, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it seems like the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a frequent serving of mostly uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film satisfied about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and seemingly more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth 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 eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail ending, possibly since it’s become so clear that rich people function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Outliers
There are exceptions, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
