A familiar theme permeates many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes far back to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul investing tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated propaganda machine to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality quite that directly, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, contrasts the resourceful inhabitants of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — to make money, naturally.
There is little particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his always poor Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is contrary to core morality, and applaud the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Alters Little
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. Whenever politicians react to a public shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the news demonstrates constantly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and social worth, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.
Actually, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of mostly uplifting fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about good conquering evil. These films are like ethical parables, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more direct, and apparently more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so clear that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exceptions
There are exceptions, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the digital realm, 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 redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
