An age-old motif courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. 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 envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending a fortune to throw the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Film Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its evil characters reside in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to cause global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies contrasting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against tycoons, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting 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 entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is at odds with fundamental decency, and celebrate the defusing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials follow a public shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the headlines reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after decades of history's most popular movies promoting the reverse.
Actually, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that impedes real-world action. Given a regular dose of predominantly uplifting fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A Sharper Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, 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’s rarely enough in the current era 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 exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy function with different standards, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exclusions
A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
