A recurring motif runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes all the way back to the era of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to defame Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while using AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about economic inequality as overtly, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, pits the scrappy residents of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in extravagant gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger worldwide catastrophe — to make money, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a string of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against corporate bosses, bosses, 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 that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the defusing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
However, for some reason, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Whenever politicians follow a public shooting event by blaming graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. And yet the headlines makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans innately link affluence to smartness and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting the opposite.
If anything, it appears that the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of mostly uplifting fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more specific, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough in the current era 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 subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals operate under different standards, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Outliers
There are exceptions, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits 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
