An age-old idea courses through numerous 2025's popular films. This concept that goes far back to the era of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while using digital impersonations and a well-honed propaganda machine to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its villains enjoy conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, pits the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in extravagant gleaming towers above the clouds. Even, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, needless to say.
There is little inherently notable in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Changes Nothing
And yet, somehow, we never get around to eating the rich. Whenever lawmakers react to a new mass shooting event by blaming graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and importance, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it looks as though the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a steady diet of predominantly uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will identify any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more targeted, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so clear that rich people function with different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the final act of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exclusions
A few stories differ, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
