An age-old idea courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This notion that stretches all the way back to the time of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Film Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity quite that directly, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, sets the tough people of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy farcical update of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept dates back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is at odds with fundamental decency, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, somehow, we never actually eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers follow a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. Still the news demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating a contradictory message.
In fact, it looks as though the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about justice being served. These films are like ethical parables, pretending that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more specific, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, 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 wealthy people were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent 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 apt to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exclusions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis 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 possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
