A familiar idea courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes all the way back to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to smear Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled arena for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and framed her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring extreme hardship, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, contrasts the resourceful residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to cause worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, naturally.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that rich people have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the early days of film, with early comedies setting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, 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 updated the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we never actually eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers react to a new mass shooting event by faulting graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. And yet the news demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.
Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that impedes real-world action. Given a regular dose of largely uplifting tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals live by a separate justice system, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exclusions
Some films diverge, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the computer world, 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 transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
