A familiar idea courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes back in time to the days of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing tens of millions to cast the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people living in abject destitution, while employing deepfakes and a sophisticated media apparatus to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its evil characters enjoy conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
It is not inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against fat cats, authority figures, 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 updated a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
However, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Whenever politicians follow a public shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the headlines makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after decades of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of predominantly triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people gain some humility 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 rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
