A familiar motif courses through many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes far back to the time of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the scrappy residents of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept goes back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his always poor Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with 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 rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is contrary to fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
And yet, inexplicably, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians respond to a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. But the news demonstrates regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously link affluence to competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies promoting the reverse.
In fact, it seems like the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of mostly happily-ever-after fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away satisfied about good conquering evil. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more direct, and seemingly more violent. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, 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 eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exceptions
There are exceptions, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
