A familiar motif courses through many of 2025's popular films. This notion which extends all the way back to the time of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while using AI forgeries and a powerful propaganda machine to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight economic inequality quite that directly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the tough people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to cause global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.
It is not particularly surprising in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, 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 a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is contrary to core morality, and applaud the defusing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
And yet, for some reason, we never get around to eating the rich. Whenever politicians react to a tragic gun violence event by blaming graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. But the headlines reveals regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately link affluence to smartness and value to society, even after decades of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.
If anything, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that hinders meaningful change. Provided with a steady diet of predominantly triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more direct, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail finale, perhaps because it’s become so clear that affluent individuals operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined 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 redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
