A recurring theme permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, all for their own profit.
A Legacy of Film Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a sophisticated propaganda machine to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality quite that directly, but its villains live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, pits the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in extravagant sky-high mansions above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to bring about worldwide catastrophe — to make money, of course.
It is not especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is at odds with core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time lawmakers react to a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. Still the headlines reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously equate riches with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies conveying a contradictory message.
If anything, it seems like the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that hinders real-world action. Provided with a regular dose of predominantly uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These movies are like ethical parables, pretending that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and seemingly more violent. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered 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, possibly since it’s become so apparent that the wealthy function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Exclusions
There are exceptions, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the computer world, 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 Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
