A recurring motif runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion that stretches back in time to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to throw the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging digital impersonations and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity as overtly, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them into unemployment and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, pits the resourceful residents of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to cause global armageddon — to make money, of course.
There is little especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged desire for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme dates back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, bosses, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is at odds with core morality, and applaud the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Alters Little
However, inexplicably, we never actually eating the rich. Whenever politicians follow a new mass shooting event by faulting graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. Still the daily reports makes it obvious every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies promoting a contradictory message.
In fact, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Provided with a regular dose of mostly triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These films are like ethical parables, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they do follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more specific, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, 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, selfish, cruel affluent villains were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under different standards, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the virtual grid, 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 unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
