A familiar theme courses through a host of 2025's popular films. This notion which extends all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people living in abject destitution, while using digital impersonations and a sophisticated media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality as overtly, but its antagonists live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the defusing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
And yet, somehow, we never actually consuming the elite. On each occasion politicians follow a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. Still the headlines demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with competence and social worth, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.
In fact, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that impedes meaningful change. Provided with a steady diet of predominantly uplifting tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These films are like ethical parables, suggesting that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will identify any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Even though 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 specific, and observably more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Exclusions
A few stories differ, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
