An age-old motif courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches back in time to the time of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his immense fortune to defame Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division in such a blunt manner, but its villains enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the tough residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — to make money, of course.
There is little especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his always poor Little Tramp character against tycoons, industrialists, 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 the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is contrary to basic human values, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we never actually consuming the elite. Every time elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. Still the daily reports makes it obvious constantly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with smartness and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting the reverse.
Actually, it seems like the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that hinders meaningful change. Given a steady diet of largely uplifting fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away feeling good about right prevailing. These movies are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more direct, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune 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 devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exceptions
There are exceptions, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. 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 culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
