A familiar motif runs through many of 2025's genre movies. This notion that stretches all the way back to the time of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing tens of millions to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while employing digital impersonations and a sophisticated media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists reside in obvious luxury 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 number one movie, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against tycoons, 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 that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Every time politicians respond to a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — surely American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. And yet the headlines makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting a contradictory message.
Actually, it appears that the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a regular dose of mostly uplifting stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that plucky heroes will weed out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more direct, and apparently more violent. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the final act of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exceptions
Some films diverge, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
