A familiar idea courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends all the way back to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its villains live in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, sets the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — for his own profit, of course.
There is little inherently notable in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies pitting his always poor Little Tramp character against tycoons, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Alters Little
And yet, for some reason, we never actually consuming the elite. On each occasion politicians respond to a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the news reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to competence and social worth, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.
If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a regular dose of predominantly happily-ever-after tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away content about good conquering evil. These movies are like ethical parables, implying that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more targeted, and apparently more lethal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people learn a useful 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 wealthy people were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so clear that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exclusions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
