A recurring motif permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches back in time to the time of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and framed her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists live in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who live in extravagant sky-high mansions above the clouds. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — to make money, of course.
There is little inherently notable in a series of movies presupposing that rich people have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is at odds with core morality, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
And yet, somehow, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time politicians respond to a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — surely American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously equate riches with intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting a contradictory message.
If anything, it appears that the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders real-world action. Offered a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away feeling good about justice being served. These movies are like cautionary fables, suggesting that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more targeted, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals operate under different standards, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
