A familiar motif runs 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 antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a rich antagonist running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people living in desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a well-honed smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its villains live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, contrasts the resourceful residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent sky-high mansions above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.
It is not particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is at odds with fundamental decency, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Release That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion politicians respond to a public shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the headlines makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and social worth, even after decades of history's most popular movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Offered a frequent serving of mostly uplifting fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These stories are like cautionary fables, implying that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will root out any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more targeted, and apparently more lethal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exclusions
Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
