A familiar theme runs through many of 2025's genre movies. This notion that stretches all the way back to the era of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending vast sums to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people living in extreme hardship, while using AI forgeries and a powerful propaganda machine to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its antagonists reside in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, of course.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a string of movies presupposing that the affluent have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled desire for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, bosses, and clueless rich men. From 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 tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, somehow, we never get around to eating the rich. Whenever elected officials respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to smartness and importance, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a frequent serving of largely happily-ever-after tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film satisfied about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so clear that rich people live by different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Outliers
There are exceptions, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply 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* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
