An age-old motif permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends all the way back to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his enormous resources to defame Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled arena to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed smear campaign to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality as overtly, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — to make money, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding appetite for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept dates back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against corporate bosses, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
However, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.
If anything, it looks as though the never-ending cycle 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 happily-ever-after tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about good conquering evil. These films are like ethical parables, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any corrupt individuals among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so clear that affluent individuals live by their own legal rules, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
