An age-old motif runs through many of 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in desperate poverty, while using deepfakes and a sophisticated propaganda machine to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, contrasts the tough residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in extravagant gleaming towers above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to bring about planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against tycoons, authority figures, 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 revised a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is contrary to core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Alters Little
However, somehow, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. And yet the news reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating a contradictory message.
If anything, it appears that the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that impedes meaningful change. Given a steady diet of mostly uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about justice being served. These stories are like ethical parables, suggesting that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more targeted, and apparently more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money 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 eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, possibly since it’s become so obvious that rich people live by a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exclusions
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, where he’s clearly 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 culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
