A familiar theme runs through many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends far back to the era of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, all for their own profit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division as overtly, but its evil characters reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, contrasts the tough people of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent gleaming towers above the clouds. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, naturally.
It is not inherently notable in a string of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme goes back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is contrary to fundamental decency, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
However, inexplicably, we never get around to eating the rich. Whenever lawmakers respond to a public shooting event by faulting graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. Still the headlines reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.
In fact, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that impedes meaningful change. Provided with a steady diet of predominantly happily-ever-after tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will identify any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by fantastical monsters (*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 shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Outliers
There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
