An age-old theme courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes far back to the days of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Film Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated smear campaign to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its antagonists live in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, pits the resourceful inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a series of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding appetite for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies setting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against tycoons, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is incompatible with fundamental decency, and applaud the defusing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Alters Little
However, for some reason, we never actually eating the rich. Whenever elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by faulting graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans innately equate riches with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting a contradictory message.
Actually, it appears that the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes meaningful change. Provided with a regular dose of predominantly uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These stories are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more direct, and apparently more violent. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, 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 killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*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*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy live by different standards, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exclusions
There are exceptions, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. 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 unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
