A recurring motif permeates many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight economic inequality quite that directly, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to cause worldwide catastrophe — to make money, of course.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding hunger for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, 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 celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, for some reason, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Whenever elected officials react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the headlines reveals regularly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies conveying a contradictory message.
In fact, it appears that the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of mostly uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about justice being served. These stories are like cautionary fables, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will identify any corrupt individuals among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more specific, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so clear that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
