A recurring idea runs through numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches back in time to the era of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending vast sums to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division quite that directly, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, sets the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Interestingly, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, of course.
There is little inherently notable in a series of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept dates back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, bosses, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to core morality, and applaud the defusing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Alters Little
Nevertheless, somehow, we never actually consuming the elite. Every time elected officials respond to a public shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. But the news reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and importance, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies promoting the reverse.
In fact, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of mostly uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away feeling good about good conquering evil. These films are like cautionary fables, suggesting that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more specific, and seemingly more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals live by a separate justice system, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
