A recurring theme runs through many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to smear Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing vast sums to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of On-Screen Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people living in abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed smear campaign to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains reside in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the tough inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish gleaming towers floating overhead. Interestingly, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.
It is not inherently notable in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding hunger for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme dates back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against fat cats, industrialists, 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 the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Whenever lawmakers follow a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious every single day that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with competence and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.
If anything, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of mostly uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will identify any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more specific, and seemingly more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, 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 blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the end of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. 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 revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
