A familiar idea runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches far back to the days of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity as overtly, but its antagonists reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them into unemployment and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
It is not particularly surprising in a series of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, 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 the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Release That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Every time politicians respond to a new mass shooting event by faulting graphic media, 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 societal mindset — certainly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.
If anything, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders substantive reform. Given a regular dose of mostly uplifting fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any corrupt individuals among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and seemingly more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in humility, 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 devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car finale, likely due to it’s become so clear that affluent individuals live by different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exceptions
Some films diverge, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the computer world, 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 reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
