A familiar motif permeates many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes far back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through desperate poverty, while using deepfakes and a well-honed smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its villains enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Interestingly, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
There is little especially new in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding desire for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with 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 greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is contrary to core morality, and applaud the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
And yet, somehow, we never actually consuming the elite. Whenever politicians react to a public shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. Still the daily reports reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously equate riches with intelligence and value to society, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies promoting a contradictory message.
If anything, it seems like the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that impedes meaningful change. Given a steady diet of largely uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about justice being served. These films are like ethical parables, pretending that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more specific, and observably more lethal. It’s rarely enough 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 oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, possibly since it’s become so apparent that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Exclusions
Some films diverge, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
