An age-old idea courses through a host of 2025's popular films. This concept that stretches all the way back to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while using AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division quite that directly, but its antagonists live in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them from their homes and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to bring about planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.
It is not especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is at odds with core morality, and exalt the defusing, defeat, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Alters Little
And yet, somehow, we never actually consuming the elite. Whenever lawmakers respond to a new mass shooting event by blaming graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. Still the daily reports makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.
If anything, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that hinders meaningful change. Given a steady diet of predominantly triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will root out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car ending, likely due to it’s become so clear that rich people live by a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exclusions
There are exceptions, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, 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 reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
