A familiar idea permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends all the way back to the days of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in abject destitution, while using deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its villains enjoy obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, pits the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, naturally.
It is not inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against corporate bosses, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the defusing, downfall, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never get around to eating the rich. Whenever lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by blaming popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. But the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.
If anything, it appears that the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a steady diet of mostly uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film feeling good about good conquering evil. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they do follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson 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 devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the computer world, 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 reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
