A recurring motif runs through many of 2025's popular films. This notion which extends back in time to the days of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and framed her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division quite that directly, but its antagonists enjoy obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, contrasts the scrappy residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
There is little especially new in a series of movies presupposing that rich people have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated 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 presume that wealth is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials follow a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. But the daily reports makes it obvious constantly that a alarming number of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.
If anything, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a frequent serving of predominantly happily-ever-after fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film feeling good about justice being served. These movies are like cautionary fables, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will identify any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and apparently more lethal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, possibly since it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Outliers
Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
