An age-old motif courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends back in time to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Film Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring extreme hardship, while using deepfakes and a sophisticated propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, pits the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gleaming towers floating overhead. Even, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — to make money, naturally.
There is little especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme goes back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians follow a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the news makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to intelligence and social worth, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of predominantly happily-ever-after fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will weed out any malicious actors among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more violent. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the virtual grid, 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 wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
