A familiar motif runs through many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes back in time to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while using deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its antagonists reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, sets the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit opulent sky-high mansions floating overhead. Even, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding appetite for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies contrasting his always poor Little Tramp character against tycoons, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. 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 rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by blaming popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the news makes it obvious constantly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies conveying the opposite.
If anything, it seems like the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a regular dose of predominantly triumphant stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they indeed follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more specific, and seemingly more fatal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exclusions
A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the virtual grid, 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 wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
