An age-old theme runs through numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches far back to the era of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to defame Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to throw the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Film Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people suffering through extreme hardship, while using digital impersonations and a well-honed propaganda machine to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division as overtly, but its villains live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Interestingly, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
There is little particularly surprising in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor Little Tramp character against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion politicians respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. Still the daily reports reveals constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously link affluence to smartness and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies conveying the reverse.
If anything, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a regular dose of largely uplifting fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will weed out any malicious actors among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, possibly since it’s become so clear that the wealthy live by different standards, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Outliers
There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
