A recurring theme runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends back in time to the days of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people suffering through extreme hardship, while using deepfakes and a sophisticated media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity quite that directly, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the resourceful inhabitants of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a series of movies taking it as a given that rich people have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting 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 exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the defusing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Alters Little
However, somehow, we never actually taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians follow a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — certainly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. Still the news reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans innately link affluence to competence and importance, even after decades of history's most popular movies promoting the reverse.
Actually, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders meaningful change. Offered a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more specific, and apparently more fatal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people gain some humility 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 wealthy people were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*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 up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, a setup that obviously 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 Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
