An age-old idea permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes back in time to the time of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to smear Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul spending a fortune to throw the heroes into a monster-filled death trap to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its antagonists live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, contrasts the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.
There is little inherently notable in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with fundamental decency, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
However, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion politicians react to a new mass shooting event by blaming violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. But the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a alarming number of Americans innately link affluence to smartness and importance, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating a contradictory message.
If anything, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Given a steady diet of predominantly triumphant tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about right prevailing. These movies are like cautionary fables, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will identify any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they indeed follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and seemingly more fatal. 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 lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exceptions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
