A recurring motif runs through many of 2025's popular films. This notion that goes back in time to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a monster-filled arena for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and set her up for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Film Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring extreme hardship, while employing deepfakes and a sophisticated smear campaign to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division as overtly, but its villains enjoy conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the resourceful people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, of course.
It is not particularly surprising in a series of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is at odds with fundamental decency, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
However, inexplicably, we never get around to eating the rich. Every time politicians follow a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that susceptible — if repeated viewing 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 daily reports reveals every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously link affluence to intelligence and importance, even after decades of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of predominantly happily-ever-after tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These movies are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more targeted, and seemingly more fatal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people gain some humility 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, greedy, hateful rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up 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 reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
