A familiar motif permeates many of 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches all the way back to the era 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 manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering tens of millions to throw the heroes into a monster-filled death trap to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people living in desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a powerful propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity as overtly, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them into unemployment and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who live in extravagant sky-high mansions floating overhead. Even, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, of course.
There’s nothing especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that rich people have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies setting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, and clueless rich men. Beginning 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 greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is contrary to core morality, and exalt the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Alters Little
However, inexplicably, we never actually eating the rich. On each occasion politicians react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. Still the news reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously link affluence to competence and value to society, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that impedes meaningful change. Offered a regular dose of predominantly uplifting stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, 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 hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Outliers
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the computer world, 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 reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
