A familiar motif runs through many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches far back to the time of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to smear Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to trap the heroes into a monster-filled arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people suffering through extreme hardship, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Interestingly, the zany humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, of course.
It is not especially new in a string of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, 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 updated a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is contrary to core morality, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
However, inexplicably, we never actually consuming the elite. Whenever lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying the reverse.
If anything, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Provided with a regular dose of predominantly uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater content about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the final act of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exclusions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of 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
