An age-old theme runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends all the way back to the time of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his immense fortune to defame Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering vast sums to throw the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people enduring abject destitution, while employing deepfakes and a well-honed smear campaign to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about wealth disparity quite that directly, but its evil characters enjoy obvious luxury 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 number one film, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Interestingly, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to cause planetary doom — to make money, naturally.
There is little especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Whenever politicians respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved 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 impedes real-world action. Offered a regular dose of predominantly happily-ever-after fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more specific, and seemingly more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals live by a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exclusions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
