🔗 Share this article

An age-old idea courses through numerous 2025's popular films. This concept that stretches back in time to the era of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing tens of millions to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.

A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare

In *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people living in desperate poverty, while employing digital impersonations and a well-honed smear campaign to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — to make money, of course.

It is not particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.

The Release That Fails to Transform

However, for some reason, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. On each occasion politicians respond to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the news reveals regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately link affluence to intelligence and importance, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.

If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a steady diet of predominantly triumphant stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like cautionary fables, suggesting that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will root out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.

A More Pointed Message 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 furious, sharper, more direct, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson 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, selfish, cruel affluent villains were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to buy their way out."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.

Significant Exclusions

There are exceptions, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid