A recurring motif courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends far back to the era of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated propaganda machine to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its villains enjoy clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, sets the resourceful people of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in lavish gleaming towers floating overhead. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about worldwide catastrophe — to make money, naturally.
It is not especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies pitting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against corporate bosses, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is at odds with fundamental decency, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion elected officials follow 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 make it seep the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the headlines demonstrates regularly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and importance, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.
If anything, it appears that the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders real-world action. Given a regular dose of mostly uplifting stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they indeed follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more specific, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, 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 rich individuals were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously 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 antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
