A familiar motif courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends all the way back to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul spending tens of millions to throw the heroes into a monster-filled arena to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people enduring abject destitution, while using AI forgeries and a well-honed smear campaign to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its villains enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them into unemployment and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, sets the tough inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Even, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.
There’s nothing especially new in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding appetite for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Alters Little
Nevertheless, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the news reveals constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it appears that the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of mostly happily-ever-after fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will identify any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and seemingly more fatal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson 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, selfish, cruel wealthy people were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so clear that affluent individuals function with a separate justice system, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Outliers
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
