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A familiar theme permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.

A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare

In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people suffering through extreme hardship, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division as overtly, but its villains enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, contrasts the tough people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — to make money, of course.

There’s nothing inherently notable in a string of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against tycoons, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.

The Catharsis That Changes Nothing

Nevertheless, for some reason, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. But the daily reports makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.

In fact, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Offered a frequent serving of predominantly triumphant tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like ethical parables, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.

An Angrier Tone in 2025

Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they indeed follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more direct, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."

The "behind bars" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.

Notable Exclusions

Some films diverge, certainly. 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, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid