A recurring theme runs through many of 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends far back to the days of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his immense fortune to defame Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul squandering tens of millions to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the scrappy residents of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger worldwide catastrophe — to make money, naturally.
There is little especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged desire for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his always poor Little Tramp character against tycoons, bosses, and clueless rich men. Starting with 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 rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to core morality, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Release That Changes Nothing
And yet, somehow, we never actually taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously link affluence to competence and importance, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of meaningful change. Offered a regular dose of mostly triumphant stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away satisfied about justice being served. These stories are like cautionary fables, implying that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more specific, and seemingly more violent. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor 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 future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
