An age-old motif courses through numerous 2025's popular films. This notion which extends far back to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to defame Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to throw the heroes into a monster-filled arena to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people suffering through abject destitution, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity as overtly, but its antagonists live in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the tough people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in opulent sky-high mansions above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against fat cats, authority figures, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is at odds with fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
And yet, somehow, we never actually taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians react to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the headlines makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating a contradictory message.
Actually, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that hinders meaningful change. Given a steady diet of largely uplifting fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will identify any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they indeed follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and apparently more lethal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by different standards, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to die at the final act of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Exclusions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
