A recurring idea runs through many of 2025's popular films. This notion that stretches back in time to the days of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his vast wealth to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro investing tens of millions to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity quite that directly, but its antagonists live in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, pits the tough people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish gleaming towers floating overhead. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — to make money, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a string of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers react to a public shooting event by faulting graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. But the news makes it obvious every single day that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.
If anything, it appears that the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that impedes real-world action. Given a steady diet of predominantly uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away satisfied about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will root out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more direct, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people function with different standards, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exceptions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the computer world, 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 wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
