A recurring idea courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people living in desperate poverty, while using AI forgeries and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its villains live in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, pits the tough inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to trigger global armageddon — to make money, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged desire for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the early days of film, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against fat cats, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
However, somehow, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials respond to a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and importance, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating a contradictory message.
In fact, it appears that the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that hinders meaningful change. Given a steady diet of predominantly uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more lethal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, 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 rich individuals were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, possibly since it’s become so clear that affluent individuals live by their own legal rules, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exceptions
There are exceptions, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds 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 transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
