A familiar theme permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends back in time to the time of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, sets the tough residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in opulent gleaming towers above the clouds. Interestingly, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is contrary to core morality, and applaud the defusing, downfall, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Alters Little
And yet, somehow, we never get around to eating the rich. Whenever lawmakers follow a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and value to society, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting the reverse.
In fact, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that hinders substantive reform. Given a regular dose of largely happily-ever-after fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more direct, and seemingly more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in humility, 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, selfish, cruel rich individuals 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 live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, possibly since it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the end of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exclusions
There are exceptions, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
