A recurring motif permeates a host of 2025's popular films. This notion that stretches back in time to the time of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a prehistoric arena to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while using deepfakes and a sophisticated smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, sets the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Even, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme dates back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, industrialists, 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 refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is contrary to core morality, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Alters Little
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. On each occasion elected officials respond to a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the headlines reveals every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously link affluence to intelligence and social worth, even after decades of history's most popular movies communicating a contradictory message.
In fact, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of predominantly happily-ever-after stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These stories are like cautionary fables, suggesting that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more targeted, and seemingly more violent. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people be taught a 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 slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car finale, possibly since it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
