🔗 Share this article

A recurring theme permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes all the way back to the era of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing tens of millions to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.

A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while employing digital impersonations and a sophisticated propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the resourceful residents of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to bring about planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.

There is little especially new in a string of movies presupposing that the wealthy have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is contrary to fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.

The Catharsis That Fails to Transform

However, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Whenever politicians react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — certainly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. Still the headlines demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and social worth, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.

Actually, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of meaningful change. Offered a regular dose of largely triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about justice being served. These movies are like ethical parables, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.

A Sharper Edge in 2025

But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more lethal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so clear that affluent individuals operate under different standards, and are very likely to negotiate their release."

The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.

Significant Exceptions

A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. 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 exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid