A familiar idea permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes far back to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Film Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated media apparatus to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the tough people of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in lavish gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, naturally.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding desire for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
And yet, somehow, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion politicians react to a new mass shooting event by faulting graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the news reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously equate riches with intelligence and importance, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.
If anything, it appears that the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Offered a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away satisfied about good conquering evil. These stories are like cautionary fables, pretending that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will identify any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they indeed follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and seemingly more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exclusions
Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
