There’s a familiar theme running through a lot of 2025’s genre movies, including its biggest box-office hits. It’s an idea that stretches all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s Superman, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his vast wealth to smear Earth’s greatest hero, while manipulating world events for his own profit. In Jurassic World: Rebirth, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions of dollars to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for his own profit. In Zootopia 2, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes from a dynasty that stole a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
In The Running Man, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in desperate poverty, while using deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. Wicked: For Good doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz’s most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. Ne Zha 2, the year’s number one box-office hit, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Even the agreeably goofy comedy reboot The Naked Gun centers on a billionaire’s plot to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, of course.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. “Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes” as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against fat cats, bosses, and an inept, drunken millionaire. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland “Let’s put on a show to save our clubhouse from being torn down by a rich developer!” films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit to the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is packed with “eat the rich” stories, which take it for granted that wealth is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
And yet, somehow, we never get around to eating the rich. Every time politicians follow a new mass shooting event in America by blaming violent video games, popular music, or media, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep into the public consciousness — surely American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately equate riches with intelligence and value to society, even after a century of history’s most popular movies communicating the opposite.
If anything, it seems like the endless parade anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a regular dose of mostly happily-ever-after fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away feeling good about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
But while 2025’s movies aren’t new in that regard, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more specific, and seemingly more lethal. It’s rarely enough 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, greedy, hateful wealthy people were slaughtered by mythological beasts (Death of a Unicorn) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (Jurassic World: Rebirth). They were blown up on a hostile planet (Mickey 17) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (The Running Man). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (Companion) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (Him).
Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the “packed into a police car and sent off to face justice” ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people in America operate under their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out of jail time and face minimal significant consequences. The “arrested and awaiting trial” ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
There are exceptions, certainly — Lex Luthor in Superman is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. (He’s too prominent of a DC character, and too useful to James Gunn’s ongoing story, to dispose of just one movie into the new DCU, and Gunn isn’t making Marvel’s mistakes about movie villains.) Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in Tron: Ares winds up exiled to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in Zootopia 2 are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet bloody ends — it’s an animated Disney movie, after all.
Even so, 2025’s movies were particularly raw and pointed in evoking the anger and contempt for billionaires that’s been cropping up more and more in cinema over the past decade. (See, for instance, The Menu, Triangle of Sadness, Knives Out and Glass Onion, or above all, Bong Joon Ho’s Oscar-winner Parasite.) Most of these movies aren’t just using the ultra-rich as conveniently mustache-twirling bad guys: They’re attacking the entire American idea of equating wealth with societal value.
The majority of these movies emphasize that the villains don’t deserve their money, because they acquired it in unethical ways: through the unearned luck of inheritance, dirty means like arms dealing and preying on the poor, or via outright theft. All of them show the villains as undeserving of the power their wealth brings, and portray them as using it in abusive, oppressive ways, particularly to erase truth and manipulate minds, or to victimize vulnerable people, animals, aliens, androids, the environment, or anything else that can be exploited or owned.
Television shows continue to have a different approach to this idea — “rich people are terrible, but fun to watch” stories like Succession or The White Lotus are much more common on TV than in movies, which still prioritize closed, complete stories where a villain schemes, then fails and falls. Hollywood cinema still loves glamorous characters and settings, but movies that feature wealthy or successful protagonists are more likely to portray their wealth as rightfully earned — and less likely to focus on what they do with that wealth.
In 2025, though, even the movies that granted some form of humanity to the rich also tended to complicate the issue. Look at Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia, which has a powerful, wealthy CEO (Emma Stone) kidnapped, held hostage, and ultimately tortured by a paranoid extremist (Jesse Plemons) who believes she’s an alien invader. Lanthimos’ film treats Stone’s character sympathetically due to her situation, while also portraying her as cruel, manipulative, and often downright dangerous, even as a captive. In the end, Plemons’ character is right to be afraid of her, and the uses she finds for her power over other people are horrifying.
It’s clear by the end of Bugonia that the world would have been better off if this wingnut fringe lunatic had murdered his CEO hostage in his dingy basement. That’s the messaging of a lot of 2025’s genre movies in a nutshell: Vast wealth turns people into monsters who can’t be trusted, and everyone will be better off if they’re all, say, eaten by dinosaurs or murdered by their own robot slaves. It isn’t a new message for the movies. But it’s a message that’s getting more strident, furious, and insistent with every passing year.