An age-old idea runs through numerous 2025's popular films. This notion that goes all the way back to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a sophisticated media apparatus to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, contrasts the tough people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in lavish sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to cause worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, of course.
It is not especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme dates back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Alters Little
Nevertheless, somehow, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Whenever elected officials react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society would not continue to revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and social worth, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that hinders real-world action. Provided with a regular dose of mostly uplifting fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These stories are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will root out any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and apparently more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on live TV (*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 super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, possibly since it’s become so clear that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined 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 transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
