An age-old motif permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches far back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to defame Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to throw the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people living in desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a sophisticated 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 antagonists reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them from their homes and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the scrappy residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. From 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 entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is contrary to fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Outlet That Alters Little
However, for some reason, we never actually eating the rich. Whenever elected officials follow a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.
In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes real-world action. Offered a steady diet of predominantly happily-ever-after fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These movies are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they indeed follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more specific, and apparently more lethal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people learn a useful 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 killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so clear that rich people function with a separate justice system, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exceptions
There are exceptions, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled 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 redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
