An age-old idea runs through many of 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes far back to the time of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people suffering through extreme hardship, while using deepfakes and a powerful propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
It is not particularly surprising in a string of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled desire for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, and clueless rich men. From 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 tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is contrary to basic human values, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Release That Alters Little
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never actually eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a public shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the news demonstrates constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and value to society, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies conveying the reverse.
Actually, it seems like the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders real-world action. Given a steady diet of predominantly happily-ever-after tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more specific, and seemingly more lethal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*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 a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals operate under different standards, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exclusions
There are exceptions, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
