An age-old idea courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro squandering tens of millions to throw the heroes into a monster-filled arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people living in abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed propaganda machine to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality quite that directly, but its villains live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to bring about worldwide catastrophe — to make money, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his always poor beloved underdog 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 revised that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with basic human values, and exalt the defusing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
However, somehow, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion politicians react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
If anything, it looks as though the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Provided with a regular dose of largely uplifting fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about right prevailing. These movies are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, 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, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, where he’s clearly 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 antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
