A familiar motif runs through many of 2025's popular films. This notion that stretches all the way back to the days of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering tens of millions to throw the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through abject destitution, while using digital impersonations and a sophisticated media apparatus to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division as overtly, but its villains live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, contrasts the resourceful people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy farcical update of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, needless to say.
There is little inherently notable in a series of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
And yet, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time elected officials follow a public shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. But the news demonstrates constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and value to society, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.
If anything, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of mostly happily-ever-after fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about justice being served. These movies are like cautionary fables, suggesting that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will root out any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more direct, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car finale, likely due to it’s become so clear that rich people live by a separate justice system, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
