An age-old theme courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches far back to the days of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his immense fortune to defame Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity as overtly, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, of course.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his always poor Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive 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 celebrate the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Whenever politicians follow a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after decades of history's most popular movies conveying the opposite.
In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that hinders meaningful change. Given a regular dose of mostly uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about good conquering evil. These films are like ethical parables, pretending that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they indeed follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so clear that affluent individuals function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Outliers
Some films diverge, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
