A familiar motif runs through many of 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends all the way back to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to defame Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul squandering vast sums to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them from their homes and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, pits the tough residents of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish gleaming towers floating overhead. Even, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to cause global armageddon — to make money, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a string of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding desire for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, authority figures, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, somehow, we never actually eating the rich. On each occasion elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. But the news demonstrates constantly that a alarming number of Americans innately link affluence to smartness and value to society, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it appears that the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that hinders real-world action. Provided with a regular dose of largely uplifting fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about justice being served. These movies are like ethical parables, pretending that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up 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 beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so clear that the wealthy function with different standards, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to perish at the final act of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Outliers
There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
