An age-old theme runs through a host of 2025's popular films. This concept which extends back in time to the time of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to trap the heroes into a monster-filled arena to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful propaganda machine to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about economic inequality as overtly, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, pits the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
There is little inherently notable in a string of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his always poor beloved underdog against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is at odds with basic human values, and applaud the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, somehow, we never actually eating the rich. Whenever politicians respond to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. But the news makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.
If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that impedes real-world action. Provided with a regular dose of largely triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about good conquering evil. These movies are like ethical parables, suggesting that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will identify any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and seemingly more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people learn a useful 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, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exclusions
There are exceptions, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. 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 revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
