An age-old motif permeates numerous 2025's popular films. This concept which extends back in time to the days of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul squandering a fortune to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Film Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while employing deepfakes and a powerful propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, sets the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who live in extravagant sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to cause global armageddon — for his own profit, of course.
It is not inherently notable in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged desire for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is at odds with fundamental decency, and exalt the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Changes Nothing
And yet, somehow, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion politicians respond to a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. But the news reveals constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.
Actually, it appears that the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a steady diet of mostly uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will identify any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more specific, and seemingly more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car finale, possibly since it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. 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 unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
