A recurring motif permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist running a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people living in abject destitution, while employing AI forgeries and a sophisticated smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its evil characters live in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, contrasts the scrappy inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Even, the lighthearted humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, somehow, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion elected officials respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the daily reports reveals constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating a contradictory message.
If anything, it seems like the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes meaningful change. Offered a steady diet of mostly uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more direct, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so clear that the wealthy function with a separate justice system, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the final act of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
