An age-old theme runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends all the way back to the time of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul squandering tens of millions to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its villains live in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, sets the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in lavish sky-high mansions floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a string of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is at odds with basic human values, and exalt the defusing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Alters Little
Nevertheless, somehow, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Whenever elected officials respond to a public shooting event by faulting graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. But the daily reports makes it obvious every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively equate riches with intelligence and importance, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that impedes meaningful change. Given a frequent serving of largely uplifting tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people live by a separate justice system, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exclusions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
