A familiar motif permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends far back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to defame Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and framed her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through abject destitution, while using deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality as overtly, but its antagonists enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, pits the resourceful inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to cause planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.
It is not inherently notable in a run of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion lawmakers follow a public shooting event by blaming graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. But the news reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively equate riches with intelligence and importance, even after a century of history's most popular movies promoting the reverse.
In fact, it looks as though the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of predominantly triumphant stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These films are like cautionary fables, implying that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more direct, and seemingly more violent. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era 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 subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exceptions
A few stories differ, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
