A familiar motif courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion that stretches back in time to the era of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful propaganda machine to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality quite that directly, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the resourceful people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Interestingly, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger worldwide catastrophe — to make money, naturally.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept dates back to the early days of film, with early comedies setting his always poor beloved underdog against fat cats, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
However, for some reason, we never actually consuming the elite. Every time lawmakers respond to a tragic gun violence event by faulting graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. And yet the daily reports reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively equate riches with intelligence and value to society, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies conveying the reverse.
If anything, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of largely happily-ever-after stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more specific, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era 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 exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, possibly since it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals operate under their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exceptions
Some films diverge, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
