An age-old idea courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches far back to the era of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his vast wealth to defame Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to trap the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring extreme hardship, while using deepfakes and a sophisticated propaganda machine to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains enjoy conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the scrappy residents of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.
There’s nothing especially new in a string of movies presupposing that the affluent have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with 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 greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, somehow, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time lawmakers follow a tragic gun violence event by blaming popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society would not continue to revere billionaires. Still the daily reports makes it obvious constantly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.
If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of meaningful change. Offered a steady diet of largely happily-ever-after tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will root out any malicious actors among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, possibly since it’s become so obvious that rich people function with a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exclusions
Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
