A familiar motif runs through many of 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists reside in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to cause global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.
It is not inherently notable in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against corporate bosses, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful 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 fundamental decency, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we never actually eating the rich. Every time politicians follow a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders meaningful change. Given a regular dose of mostly uplifting stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film satisfied about justice being served. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they indeed follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exceptions
There are exceptions, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
