An age-old theme courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes back in time to the era of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to cast the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Film Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people living in abject destitution, while employing deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality as overtly, but its evil characters enjoy obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them from their homes and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, contrasts the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with 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 exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is contrary to fundamental decency, and applaud the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers follow a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals regularly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies conveying the reverse.
Actually, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders meaningful change. Given a regular dose of mostly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will identify any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more direct, and seemingly more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, possibly since it’s become so apparent that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to perish at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exceptions
Some films diverge, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the digital realm, 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 wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
