A familiar idea permeates many of 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes far back to the time of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul spending tens of millions to throw the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Film Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people suffering through extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated media apparatus to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, pits the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to trigger global armageddon — to make money, naturally.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme dates back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is contrary to core morality, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a tragic gun violence event by blaming graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — surely American society would not continue to worship billionaires. But the daily reports reveals regularly 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 seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders meaningful change. Offered a steady diet of largely happily-ever-after stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by a separate justice system, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Outliers
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
