A recurring motif runs through many of 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes far back to the era of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to defame Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people living in abject destitution, while using digital impersonations and a well-honed propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its antagonists live in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the resourceful residents of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Interestingly, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to bring about worldwide catastrophe — to make money, needless to say.
There is little particularly surprising in a string of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor beloved underdog against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never actually consuming the elite. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously link affluence to competence and social worth, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies promoting a contradictory message.
In fact, it seems like the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a steady diet of largely triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, pretending that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more specific, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail finale, likely due to it’s become so clear that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Outliers
Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
