An age-old idea permeates many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro squandering tens of millions to trap the heroes into a monster-filled death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Film Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a rich antagonist operating a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while employing digital impersonations and a powerful smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality quite that directly, but its evil characters reside in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them into unemployment and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, contrasts the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies pitting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against tycoons, authority figures, 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 Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to basic human values, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Alters Little
However, for some reason, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Every time lawmakers react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. Still the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with competence and importance, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.
Actually, it appears that the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that hinders substantive reform. Given a regular dose of mostly triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away satisfied about good conquering evil. These films are like cautionary fables, implying that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more targeted, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays 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, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, possibly since it’s become so apparent that rich people function with a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
