An age-old theme permeates a host of 2025's popular films. It's an idea that goes far back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul squandering vast sums to trap the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, all for their own profit.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about economic inequality quite that directly, but its antagonists enjoy conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the tough inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in extravagant gleaming towers floating overhead. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to bring about planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
However, for some reason, we never actually consuming the elite. Every time lawmakers react to a public shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. But the news makes it obvious regularly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of predominantly triumphant stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about good conquering evil. These stories are like cautionary fables, pretending that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more direct, and apparently more fatal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car finale, possibly since it’s become so clear that affluent individuals live by a separate justice system, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exclusions
There are exceptions, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits 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
