A familiar theme permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches far back to the era of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending tens of millions to cast the heroes into a monster-filled death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while using AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to cause worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, naturally.
There is little especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have disproportionate control, 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 dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is contrary to basic human values, and exalt the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Changes Nothing
And yet, inexplicably, we never actually eating the rich. On each occasion politicians respond to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. Still the headlines reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating a contradictory message.
In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that hinders real-world action. Given a regular dose of largely uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like ethical parables, implying that the system works, and that plucky heroes will identify any corrupt individuals among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more specific, and seemingly more violent. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to perish at the final act of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up 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 reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
