An age-old theme courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes far back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to defame Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul spending vast sums to trap the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of On-Screen Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people living in abject destitution, while using AI forgeries and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division in such a blunt manner, but its villains enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.
There’s nothing especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding desire for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is contrary to fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we never actually consuming the elite. Whenever politicians react to a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious constantly that a alarming number of Americans innately link affluence to competence and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies conveying the reverse.
In fact, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that impedes real-world action. Offered a regular dose of mostly uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away satisfied about good conquering evil. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they do follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exceptions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
