An age-old theme runs through numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches far back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its villains enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish sky-high mansions floating overhead. Interestingly, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — to make money, of course.
There’s nothing especially new in a string of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the defusing, defeat, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, somehow, we never actually eating the rich. Whenever politicians respond to a public shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. Still the headlines makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it appears that the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a regular dose of mostly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any corrupt individuals among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more fatal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson 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, greedy, hateful rich individuals were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, possibly since it’s become so clear that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
