An age-old theme permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches far back to the days of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to defame Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering vast sums to trap the heroes into a monster-filled arena for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people living in abject destitution, while using deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, pits the resourceful inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against fat cats, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Alters Little
However, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. Whenever elected officials respond to a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies promoting the reverse.
In fact, it appears that the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a frequent serving of mostly happily-ever-after stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater content about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more direct, and apparently more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, 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, greedy, hateful wealthy people were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exclusions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
