An age-old idea permeates many of 2025's popular films. This notion that goes far back to the days of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul squandering tens of millions to cast the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of On-Screen Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people living in abject destitution, while employing deepfakes and a well-honed smear campaign to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its evil characters reside in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them into unemployment and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, contrasts the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
There is little inherently notable in a series of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials respond to a tragic gun violence event by faulting popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
Actually, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes meaningful change. Given a steady diet of mostly happily-ever-after stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away content about good conquering evil. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more direct, and seemingly more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, 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, selfish, cruel wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exceptions
There are exceptions, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
