An age-old idea runs through numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion that stretches back in time to the time of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people living in desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight economic inequality as overtly, but its villains live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in extravagant gleaming towers floating overhead. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
There is little especially new in a string of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor beloved underdog against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is contrary to fundamental decency, and applaud the defusing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials follow a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating a contradictory message.
Actually, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that impedes substantive reform. Provided with a steady diet of largely happily-ever-after fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These films are like ethical parables, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they indeed follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era 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 affluent villains were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
