An age-old theme permeates many of 2025's popular films. It's an idea which extends far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering tens of millions to throw the heroes into a prehistoric arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed media apparatus to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.
It is not particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
However, inexplicably, we never actually eating the rich. On each occasion politicians respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports reveals constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously link affluence to competence and importance, even after decades of history's most popular movies promoting the reverse.
Actually, it appears that the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of largely triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, pretending that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will identify any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and apparently more violent. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals operate under a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exceptions
Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply 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 future installments. 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 exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
