A familiar idea permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends back in time to the era of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Cinematic Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its villains reside in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, pits the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Even, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, of course.
There is little inherently notable in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme goes back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Alters Little
However, somehow, we never get around to consuming the elite. Whenever elected officials follow a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — certainly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the headlines reveals regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and value to society, even after decades of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.
If anything, it seems like the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a steady diet of predominantly triumphant fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more direct, and observably more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that the wealthy live by a separate justice system, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exceptions
Some films diverge, 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 digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
