An age-old idea runs through many of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his vast wealth to smear Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a monster-filled death trap to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, contrasts the tough people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant gleaming towers floating overhead. Remarkably, the lighthearted humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to cause planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.
It is not especially new in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies contrasting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, industrialists, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we never actually consuming the elite. On each occasion politicians react to a new mass shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies promoting the opposite.
Actually, it appears that the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that impedes meaningful change. Provided with a steady diet of predominantly triumphant stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away satisfied about good conquering evil. These stories are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any corrupt individuals among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more direct, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so clear that the wealthy operate under different standards, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
