A familiar theme courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his vast wealth to defame Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul squandering tens of millions to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated propaganda machine to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, sets the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — to make money, of course.
There is little especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. On each occasion lawmakers follow a tragic gun violence event by blaming popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. But the headlines makes it obvious every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting the opposite.
Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a frequent serving of predominantly happily-ever-after fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more specific, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, possibly since it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals operate under different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the final act of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exclusions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
