A recurring idea permeates a host of 2025's popular films. It's an idea which extends back in time to the time of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains enjoy clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, pits the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Even, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding appetite for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is contrary to fundamental decency, and applaud the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Outlet That Alters Little
However, for some reason, we never actually eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious constantly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of predominantly happily-ever-after stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that determined protagonists will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more direct, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient these days 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 subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious 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 obvious that rich people live by different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the final act of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exclusions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
