A familiar idea courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people living in abject destitution, while using digital impersonations and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a series of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, 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 revised the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion lawmakers react to a new mass shooting event by blaming graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and social worth, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting the reverse.
If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders meaningful change. Offered a steady diet of largely happily-ever-after tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any corrupt individuals among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Outliers
Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
