An age-old idea runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches back in time to the era of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul investing tens of millions to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Film Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful propaganda machine to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality as overtly, but its evil characters enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the resourceful residents of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Even, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — to make money, naturally.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a string of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged desire for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, industrialists, 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 rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Outlet That Alters Little
Nevertheless, for some reason, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Whenever elected officials follow a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. But the news reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and social worth, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies promoting the reverse.
Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes real-world action. Given a frequent serving of predominantly happily-ever-after tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away satisfied about good conquering evil. These films are like ethical parables, pretending that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will root out any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, 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 wealthy people were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail ending, possibly since it’s become so clear that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exceptions
There are exceptions, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
