A recurring theme courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches far back to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his immense fortune to smear Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul spending tens of millions to trap the heroes into a monster-filled arena for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring abject destitution, while using deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.
It is not especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding desire for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed 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 wealth is contrary to basic human values, and applaud the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we never actually consuming the elite. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a new mass shooting event by blaming violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the headlines reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and social worth, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting the reverse.
If anything, it appears that the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes real-world action. Given a regular dose of largely uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These movies are like ethical parables, pretending that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will identify any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more targeted, and observably more violent. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, 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, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly 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 ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Outliers
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
