A familiar idea courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes far back to the time of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to smear Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people living in extreme hardship, while employing deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains live in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish gleaming towers floating overhead. Even, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.
There is little particularly surprising in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against corporate bosses, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with 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 exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is contrary to core morality, and exalt the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, somehow, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Every time elected officials respond to a public shooting event by faulting graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. But the daily reports makes it obvious every single day that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously equate riches with smartness and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies conveying the opposite.
If anything, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that hinders substantive reform. Given a regular dose of largely triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like ethical parables, pretending that society is just, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people learn a useful 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, selfish, cruel affluent villains were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*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 super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, perhaps because it’s become so clear that affluent individuals live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exclusions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
