A recurring motif courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing vast sums to trap the heroes into a monster-filled arena for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of On-Screen Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while using digital impersonations and a sophisticated propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity as overtly, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them into unemployment and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the tough people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent gleaming towers above the clouds. Even, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — to make money, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a string of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged desire for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the early days of film, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against fat cats, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to fundamental decency, and applaud the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
However, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time politicians respond to a new mass shooting event by blaming violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans innately link affluence to smartness and value to society, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies promoting the reverse.
In fact, it seems like the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that impedes meaningful change. Offered a steady diet of mostly triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These films are like ethical parables, implying that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they indeed follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exclusions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
