A familiar motif runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes far back to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering tens of millions to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality as overtly, but its villains live in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, pits the resourceful inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.
There is little inherently notable in a string of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is at odds with fundamental decency, and applaud the defusing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Every time elected officials respond to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the news reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies conveying the opposite.
If anything, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that impedes substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of predominantly triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, suggesting that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will identify any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more direct, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, 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 wealthy people were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to perish at the end of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
