An age-old idea permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while using AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists reside in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, pits the tough people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in extravagant sky-high mansions floating overhead. Even, the zany humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled desire for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, bosses, 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 refreshed a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is contrary to fundamental decency, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Outlet That Alters Little
However, somehow, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion elected officials react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. But the daily reports reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans innately equate riches with smartness and value to society, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting the reverse.
Actually, it seems like the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that hinders substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of largely triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they indeed follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more violent. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people function with different standards, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Exclusions
There are exceptions, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits 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
