A familiar motif permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes back in time to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled death trap to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring extreme hardship, while employing deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them out of jobs and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the resourceful people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme dates back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Changes Nothing
And yet, somehow, we never actually consuming the elite. Whenever politicians react to a public shooting event by blaming graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies conveying a contradictory message.
If anything, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that hinders meaningful change. Provided with a steady diet of predominantly triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like ethical parables, pretending that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more direct, and seemingly more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exceptions
There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
