A familiar theme courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his vast wealth to smear Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight economic inequality as overtly, but its evil characters reside in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the resourceful people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Interestingly, the zany comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a series of movies presupposing that rich people have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, industrialists, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is contrary to fundamental decency, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never actually consuming the elite. Whenever politicians follow a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. Still the headlines demonstrates constantly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively equate riches with smartness and social worth, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies conveying the reverse.
Actually, it appears that the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that hinders meaningful change. Provided with a steady diet of mostly happily-ever-after fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like cautionary fables, pretending that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more violent. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, 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 wealthy people 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 gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car ending, likely due to it’s become so clear that affluent individuals operate under their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exceptions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the digital realm, a setup that obviously 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
