A recurring theme courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes far back to the time of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear 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 dinosaur-packed death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Film Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people living in extreme hardship, while employing digital impersonations and a well-honed smear campaign to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its evil characters reside in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, contrasts the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to bring about global armageddon — to make money, naturally.
It is not especially new in a string of movies presupposing that rich people have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged desire for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against tycoons, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is at odds with fundamental decency, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
Nevertheless, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Whenever politicians react to a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately link affluence to competence and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating a contradictory message.
If anything, it seems like 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 largely uplifting fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film feeling good about good conquering evil. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they do follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more targeted, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on a broadcast (*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 driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so clear that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
