A recurring idea courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches all the way back to the days of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality as overtly, but its villains live in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them into unemployment and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, pits the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — to make money, naturally.
There is little inherently notable in a run of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies setting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is contrary to fundamental decency, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
And yet, somehow, we never actually eating the rich. On each occasion elected officials follow a new mass shooting event by blaming violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a frequent serving of mostly happily-ever-after stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These stories are like cautionary fables, pretending that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will identify any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more targeted, and apparently more lethal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, likely due to it’s become so clear that rich people function with different standards, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exclusions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits 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
