An age-old theme courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches far back to the era of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled death trap to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while employing digital impersonations and a sophisticated propaganda machine to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality as overtly, but its villains live in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the tough residents of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit extravagant gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to cause planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against tycoons, authority figures, 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 refreshed that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is contrary to core morality, and applaud the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the headlines reveals regularly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and importance, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating a contradictory message.
Actually, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of mostly uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that determined protagonists will root out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more direct, and seemingly more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, possibly since it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals operate under different standards, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
