A recurring theme runs through many of 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends far back to the days of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to smear Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending vast sums to trap the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Cinematic Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them from their homes and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, contrasts the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to bring about planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme goes back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against fat cats, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is at odds with fundamental decency, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
Nevertheless, somehow, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a public shooting event by faulting graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. And yet the news reveals constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after decades of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Provided with a regular dose of largely triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away feeling good about good conquering evil. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will root out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more targeted, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail ending, possibly since it’s become so apparent that the wealthy function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
