An age-old idea runs through many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches far back to the days of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his vast wealth to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through abject destitution, while using deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality as overtly, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them into unemployment and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the resourceful people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in lavish gleaming towers in the sky. Even, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to cause planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.
It is not especially new in a string of movies presupposing that rich people have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies setting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against corporate bosses, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
However, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Every time politicians react to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with competence and social worth, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.
Actually, it appears that the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a steady diet of mostly triumphant fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film content about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any corrupt individuals among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 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 targeted, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, 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 affluent villains were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exceptions
There are exceptions, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
