A recurring motif courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes all the way back to the days of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his vast wealth to smear Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people living in abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains reside in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, pits the tough people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit extravagant gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Even, the zany humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to cause global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.
It is not especially new in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the early days of film, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against fat cats, bosses, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is at odds with fundamental decency, and applaud the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians follow a new mass shooting event by blaming violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — surely American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively equate riches with smartness and importance, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.
If anything, it seems like the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that impedes meaningful change. Provided with a frequent serving of largely uplifting stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away content about good conquering evil. These films are like ethical parables, pretending that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Outliers
Some films diverge, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
