A familiar theme permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches far back to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul spending vast sums to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its villains reside in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, contrasts the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the lighthearted farcical update of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to cause global armageddon — for his own profit, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is contrary to fundamental decency, and exalt the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Alters Little
And yet, for some reason, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately equate riches with smartness and value to society, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it looks as though the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of mostly triumphant tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more direct, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated 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*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy function with different standards, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exceptions
There are exceptions, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the digital realm, 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 Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
