A familiar idea permeates many of 2025's popular films. This concept that goes far back to the time of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to defame Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro investing vast sums to throw the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a rich antagonist operating a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a sophisticated smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight economic inequality quite that directly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, pits the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
There is little particularly surprising in a series of movies presupposing that the affluent have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies contrasting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, somehow, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and social worth, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a steady diet of predominantly uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away satisfied about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will root out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and apparently more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, possibly since it’s become so clear that affluent individuals operate under different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
