A recurring theme permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to smear Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its antagonists live in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his always poor beloved underdog against corporate bosses, authority figures, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Whenever lawmakers respond to a public shooting event by faulting graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies conveying the opposite.
In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of predominantly uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away satisfied about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more targeted, and seemingly more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car finale, possibly since it’s become so obvious that the wealthy function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Exceptions
Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
