A familiar motif courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering vast sums to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring abject destitution, while employing digital impersonations and a well-honed smear campaign to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the tough residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Even, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — to make money, naturally.
It is not especially new in a string of movies presupposing that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his always poor Little Tramp character against tycoons, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the defusing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, somehow, we never actually eating the rich. Whenever elected officials follow a new mass shooting event by blaming graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — certainly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. And yet the news reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies communicating a contradictory message.
If anything, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a steady diet of predominantly happily-ever-after fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about good conquering evil. These movies are like cautionary fables, suggesting that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more direct, and observably more lethal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, possibly since it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exclusions
Some films diverge, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
