A recurring theme permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion that stretches far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his vast wealth to smear Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering tens of millions to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated smear campaign to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, contrasts the tough inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent gleaming towers floating overhead. Remarkably, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, of course.
There is little especially new in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding appetite for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme goes back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against fat cats, bosses, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. On each occasion politicians react to a new mass shooting event by blaming graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously equate riches with smartness and social worth, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating a contradictory message.
Actually, it seems like the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that impedes meaningful change. Given a regular dose of mostly uplifting stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about justice being served. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Message 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 furious, sharper, more specific, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car finale, perhaps because it’s become so clear that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Outliers
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
