A familiar theme runs through numerous 2025's popular films. This concept which extends far back to the days of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to defame Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity quite that directly, but its evil characters reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them into unemployment and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the scrappy residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.
There’s nothing especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding desire for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is at odds with fundamental decency, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Every time lawmakers follow a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. But the headlines reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans innately equate riches with competence and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies promoting the reverse.
Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders meaningful change. Provided with a regular dose of largely uplifting fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more specific, and seemingly more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exclusions
Some films diverge, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
