A familiar motif courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated propaganda machine to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the tough inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in extravagant sky-high mansions floating overhead. Even, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against fat cats, bosses, and clueless rich men. 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 rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is contrary to basic human values, and applaud the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Whenever elected officials follow a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the news reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans innately associate wealth with competence and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying the reverse.
In fact, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that gets in the way of real-world action. Provided with a regular dose of largely happily-ever-after stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about justice being served. These stories are like cautionary fables, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and apparently more fatal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals live by different standards, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Outliers
There are exceptions, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
