An age-old idea courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends back in time to the days of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his immense fortune to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending a fortune to throw the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while employing deepfakes and a sophisticated media apparatus to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Remarkably, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
It is not especially new in a string of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is at odds with fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never actually eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers react to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. But the headlines reveals regularly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.
In fact, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of largely happily-ever-after fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will identify any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more targeted, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, likely due to it’s become so clear that affluent individuals live by a separate justice system, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the virtual grid, 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 transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
