A familiar theme permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro investing a fortune to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people living in abject destitution, while using AI forgeries and a sophisticated media apparatus to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity quite that directly, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them from their homes and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the zany farcical update of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to bring about global armageddon — to make money, of course.
It is not especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Release That Fails to Transform
However, somehow, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Whenever elected officials respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — surely American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the news reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously equate riches with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.
Actually, it seems like the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that hinders real-world action. Given a frequent serving of mostly happily-ever-after fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away feeling good about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient these days 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 subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
