A familiar theme courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending vast sums to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed propaganda machine to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, contrasts the resourceful inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, of course.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a series of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding appetite for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is contrary to core morality, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
And yet, somehow, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Whenever lawmakers respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. Still the headlines reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously link affluence to intelligence and social worth, even after a century of history's most popular movies promoting a contradictory message.
In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that impedes substantive reform. Given a regular dose of predominantly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away satisfied about justice being served. These films are like cautionary fables, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more specific, and apparently more lethal. 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 affluent villains were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, possibly since it’s become so obvious that rich people function with a separate justice system, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to die at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
