A recurring theme courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes back in time to the days of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division quite that directly, but its villains live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them from their homes and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, pits the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit extravagant gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Remarkably, the zany farcical update of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to bring about worldwide catastrophe — to make money, of course.
It is not especially new in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged desire for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is at odds with core morality, and exalt the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — surely American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the daily reports makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying the reverse.
If anything, it seems like the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of predominantly uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These films are like ethical parables, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and apparently more fatal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious 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 hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Outliers
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
