An age-old motif runs through many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending tens of millions to cast the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and set her up for murder, all for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while using digital impersonations and a sophisticated smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists reside in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Even, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
It is not particularly surprising in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is contrary to basic human values, and exalt the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion lawmakers react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the headlines reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a steady diet of mostly triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about good conquering evil. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will identify any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Message 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, sharper, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson 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, selfish, cruel affluent villains were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people function with a separate justice system, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the computer world, teasing that he is 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 unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
