An age-old theme courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends far back to the days of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled arena for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Film Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while employing AI forgeries and a sophisticated propaganda machine to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in lavish sky-high mansions floating overhead. Even, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, naturally.
It is not especially new in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept dates back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, industrialists, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion elected officials respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. But the headlines makes it obvious regularly that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with competence and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.
If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of predominantly uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will identify any corrupt individuals among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, 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 oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car finale, possibly since it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals operate under different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the final act of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exclusions
Some films diverge, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
