A recurring motif courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes all the way back to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his vast wealth to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing tens of millions to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people suffering through extreme hardship, while using AI forgeries and a powerful propaganda machine to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them into unemployment and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the resourceful residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the zany comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
It is not especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against fat cats, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Alters Little
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never actually consuming the elite. Every time elected officials respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively equate riches with intelligence and importance, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of meaningful change. Offered a regular dose of mostly happily-ever-after stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more direct, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail finale, possibly since it’s become so obvious that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to perish at the final act of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exclusions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses 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