A recurring idea courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes far back to the era of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, contrasts the tough residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning 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 exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is at odds with fundamental decency, and exalt the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Alters Little
And yet, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Whenever politicians respond to a new mass shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. But the daily reports reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans innately link affluence to competence and value to society, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.
If anything, it appears that the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that hinders real-world action. Offered a steady diet of predominantly triumphant fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about good conquering evil. These films are like ethical parables, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Although 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 more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and seemingly more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds 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
