An age-old theme runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people living in abject destitution, while employing AI forgeries and a sophisticated propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the resourceful residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to cause global armageddon — to make money, needless to say.
It is not particularly surprising in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding appetite for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept dates back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is incompatible with fundamental decency, and applaud the defusing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. And yet the headlines makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately link affluence to intelligence and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies conveying a contradictory message.
Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a regular dose of predominantly uplifting fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will weed out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more specific, and seemingly more fatal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, 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, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car ending, possibly since it’s become so obvious that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exceptions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
