A familiar theme courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to defame Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing tens of millions to trap the heroes into a monster-filled arena to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Tradition of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people enduring extreme hardship, while using digital impersonations and a well-honed propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them into unemployment and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, contrasts the resourceful inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — to make money, naturally.
It is not inherently notable in a series of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is contrary to basic human values, and applaud the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
And yet, somehow, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials respond to a public shooting event by blaming violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and value to society, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a steady diet of mostly triumphant stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that plucky heroes will weed out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and seemingly more lethal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so clear that affluent individuals live by a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
