A recurring motif courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches all the way back to the time of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled death trap to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Film Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, sets the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany farcical update of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, naturally.
There is little inherently notable in a series of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the early days of film, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against tycoons, industrialists, 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 the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is at odds with fundamental decency, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Alters Little
However, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by blaming 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 societal mindset — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and social worth, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies communicating a contradictory message.
Actually, it appears that the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes meaningful change. Given a regular dose of mostly happily-ever-after tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about justice being served. These movies are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era 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 subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, possibly since it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals operate under different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to die at the final act of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exclusions
There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the digital realm, where he’s clearly 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 antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
