An age-old theme courses through many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches all the way back to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his vast wealth to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a rich antagonist operating a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters 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 Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, contrasts the resourceful inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy farcical update of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.
There’s nothing especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is at odds with fundamental decency, and exalt the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Alters Little
However, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. And yet the news reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans innately link affluence to intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it appears that the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of mostly uplifting fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about good conquering evil. These films are like cautionary fables, suggesting that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more specific, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, 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 wealthy people were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exceptions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
