A familiar idea permeates many of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his enormous resources to defame Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through extreme hardship, while leveraging digital impersonations and a sophisticated media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, pits the tough inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who live in extravagant gleaming towers above the clouds. Even, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a series of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding appetite for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. 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 Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Alters Little
However, for some reason, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers follow a public shooting event by faulting graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously link affluence to competence and value to society, even after decades of history's most popular movies promoting the reverse.
In fact, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes meaningful change. Provided with a regular dose of largely triumphant fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away feeling good about good conquering evil. These stories are like cautionary fables, suggesting that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more specific, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car finale, likely due to it’s become so clear that affluent individuals live by a separate justice system, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exclusions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
