An age-old theme courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches far back to the days of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his immense fortune to defame Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while employing digital impersonations and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its evil characters enjoy conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, contrasts the resourceful residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
It is not especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Fails to Transform
However, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. Whenever lawmakers respond to a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — surely American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. And yet the news reveals regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.
In fact, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of meaningful change. Provided with a frequent serving of mostly triumphant fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about good conquering evil. These movies are like ethical parables, implying that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will identify any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more direct, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, possibly since it’s become so obvious that rich people function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
