A familiar idea courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends back in time to the era of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while using deepfakes and a powerful propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains live in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them from their homes and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, contrasts the scrappy inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to bring about global armageddon — to make money, naturally.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged desire for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is at odds with fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Every time politicians react to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the daily reports makes it obvious constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it appears that the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a steady diet of predominantly triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they do follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and apparently more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, possibly since it’s become so apparent that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
