An age-old theme courses through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that stretches far back to the era of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to defame 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 throw the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through desperate poverty, while employing digital impersonations and a sophisticated propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, pits the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.
It is not inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is at odds with core morality, and applaud the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, somehow, we never get around to eating the rich. Every time lawmakers react to a new mass shooting event by blaming violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. Still the daily reports reveals regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately equate riches with competence and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies conveying the reverse.
In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that impedes substantive reform. Given a steady diet of mostly triumphant tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more direct, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, 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, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car ending, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to die at the final act of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
