A recurring motif permeates many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the days of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people living in desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality as overtly, but its villains live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, sets the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the lighthearted humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a string of movies presupposing that rich people have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding appetite for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against fat cats, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
And yet, somehow, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Every time elected officials follow a public shooting event by blaming graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society would not continue to revere billionaires. Still the daily reports makes it obvious constantly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.
Actually, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that hinders substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of mostly uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about justice being served. These films are like ethical parables, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will root out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they indeed follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the final act of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
