A recurring theme courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This notion that stretches back in time to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to defame Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering tens of millions to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division as overtly, but its evil characters reside in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Even, the zany comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.
It is not inherently notable in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor Little Tramp character against tycoons, bosses, and clueless rich men. From 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 rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the defusing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Every time politicians react to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. But the news makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.
Actually, it appears that the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a steady diet of predominantly triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away content about good conquering evil. These movies are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more direct, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exclusions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
