An age-old theme courses through numerous 2025's popular films. It's an idea that stretches far back to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people living in extreme hardship, while employing AI forgeries and a sophisticated propaganda machine to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the scrappy residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, needless to say.
It is not inherently notable in a series of movies taking it as a given that rich people have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. From 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 greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is contrary to basic human values, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
And yet, somehow, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time 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 collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. But the daily reports makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously link affluence to competence and value to society, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it appears that the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a regular dose of largely triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like cautionary fables, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will identify any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Edge 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 enraged, sharper, more targeted, and seemingly more lethal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, 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 affluent villains were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
