An age-old motif runs through a host of 2025's popular films. This concept that stretches far back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to defame Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to cast the heroes into a monster-filled arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people living in abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its evil characters reside in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, naturally.
It is not especially new in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. 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 greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is contrary to fundamental decency, and exalt the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Every time politicians react to a tragic gun violence event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and social worth, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that hinders real-world action. Offered a regular dose of predominantly triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away satisfied about good conquering evil. These films are like ethical parables, implying that the system works, and that plucky heroes will root out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they indeed follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more targeted, and apparently more fatal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exclusions
A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
