A familiar theme runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches far back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Film Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people living in abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them into unemployment and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, contrasts the resourceful inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who live in extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Interestingly, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to cause worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a run of movies presupposing that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding desire for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is contrary to fundamental decency, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
And yet, for some reason, we never actually eating the rich. Every time politicians respond to a public shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively link affluence to intelligence and social worth, even after decades of history's most popular movies promoting the opposite.
If anything, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that impedes substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of mostly triumphant fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, implying that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more direct, and seemingly more lethal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, 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, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*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 gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals live by different standards, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exclusions
Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
