A familiar idea permeates many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes back in time to the era of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring extreme hardship, while using AI forgeries and a sophisticated smear campaign to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its villains enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, sets the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant gleaming towers floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.
It is not inherently notable in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme dates back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his always poor beloved underdog against corporate bosses, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is at odds with core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion politicians respond to a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals regularly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies promoting a contradictory message.
If anything, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that hinders meaningful change. Offered a steady diet of mostly triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like ethical parables, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will weed out any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more direct, and apparently more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, possibly since it’s become so apparent that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to die at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
