An age-old theme courses through a host of 2025's popular films. This concept which extends all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his vast wealth to defame Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Film Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people living in extreme hardship, while employing digital impersonations and a powerful propaganda machine to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Starting 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 exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
However, for some reason, we never actually consuming the elite. Whenever elected officials follow a public shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society would not continue to worship billionaires. Still the daily reports reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively associate wealth with competence and social worth, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies promoting the reverse.
In fact, it seems like the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes meaningful change. Provided with a frequent serving of mostly uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will root out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more specific, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car ending, possibly since it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exceptions
Some films diverge, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
