A familiar theme runs through numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends back in time to the era of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his immense fortune to smear Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled arena for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, all for their own profit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its villains enjoy obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, pits the resourceful residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Even, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to cause worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, needless to say.
It is not especially new in a string of movies presupposing that the affluent have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged desire for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to core morality, and applaud the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Every time lawmakers react to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — surely American society would not continue to revere billionaires. Still the news demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying a contradictory message.
If anything, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of mostly triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more lethal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exceptions
A few stories differ, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
