An age-old idea permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches far back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro squandering tens of millions to cast the heroes into a monster-filled arena to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the scrappy residents of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent sky-high mansions in the sky. Interestingly, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
It is not particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that rich people have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding hunger for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept goes back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor Little Tramp character against tycoons, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. 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 exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never actually eating the rich. Every time politicians respond to a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. But the headlines reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously equate riches with competence and importance, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating a contradictory message.
If anything, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a frequent serving of mostly happily-ever-after stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and seemingly more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, 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, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured 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 murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under different standards, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
