An age-old motif courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches far back to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending vast sums to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in abject destitution, while using digital impersonations and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its evil characters live in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them out of jobs and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the resourceful residents of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled 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 the Little Tramp's adventures setting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against fat cats, 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 Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is at odds with core morality, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians react to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, 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 idolize billionaires. But the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and importance, even after decades of history's most popular movies promoting the reverse.
Actually, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders real-world action. Given a regular dose of predominantly triumphant stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will weed out any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, 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 slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that the wealthy function with different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exceptions
Some films diverge, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
