A familiar motif permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion that stretches far back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone 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 life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its villains live in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, naturally.
There is little especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding appetite for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies pitting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is at odds with core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Outlet That Alters Little
However, for some reason, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials respond to a new mass shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — surely American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a regular dose of largely triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away feeling good about justice being served. These movies are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will weed out any corrupt individuals among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more specific, and observably more violent. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were eliminated 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 shot in the face point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals operate under a separate justice system, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to die at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exceptions
There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
