🔗 Share this article

An age-old idea courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This notion that stretches all the way back to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his immense fortune to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.

A Lineage of Film Class Warfare

In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful propaganda machine to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains reside in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them into unemployment and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent gleaming towers floating overhead. Even, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.

There’s nothing inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding desire for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.

The Catharsis That Alters Little

However, somehow, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Every time politicians follow a new mass shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. But the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.

In fact, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders real-world action. Given a regular dose of mostly triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film feeling good about justice being served. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.

A More Pointed Tone in 2025

But while 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they indeed follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car ending, perhaps because it’s become so clear that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to buy their way out."

The "behind bars" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.

Significant Exclusions

A few stories differ, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses 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