An age-old motif runs through many 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 jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul squandering a fortune to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, contrasts the resourceful residents of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Even, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, needless to say.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Changes Nothing
And yet, somehow, we never actually taking down the wealthy. On each occasion elected officials react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously link affluence to competence and importance, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.
If anything, it seems like the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a regular dose of mostly uplifting fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away satisfied about justice being served. These movies are like cautionary fables, implying that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more specific, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson 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, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, possibly since it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exclusions
There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
