An age-old motif runs through many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes back in time to the era of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to defame Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality quite that directly, but its antagonists live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions above the clouds. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
It is not inherently notable in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed 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 presume that affluence is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. Whenever politicians respond to a public shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes meaningful change. Offered a steady diet of predominantly happily-ever-after fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about good conquering evil. These movies 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 pulled themselves up on their own merit.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more direct, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays 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, greedy, hateful rich individuals were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals live by different standards, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the end of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exceptions
There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of 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