An age-old theme courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes all the way back to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul squandering tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality quite that directly, but its villains enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit lavish gleaming towers floating overhead. Even, the zany comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, of course.
It is not inherently notable in a string of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme goes back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion elected officials follow a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the headlines reveals every single day that a alarming number of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and social worth, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies conveying a contradictory message.
If anything, it seems like the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that impedes substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of mostly triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, suggesting that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will identify any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and observably more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to perish at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
