A recurring motif courses through numerous 2025's popular films. This notion which extends back in time to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his immense fortune to smear Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul spending a fortune to throw the heroes into a monster-filled death trap to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Cinematic Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while employing AI forgeries and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity as overtly, but its evil characters enjoy obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent gleaming towers above the clouds. Even, the zany humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
There’s nothing especially new in a string of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged desire for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, authority figures, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is at odds with fundamental decency, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Every time elected officials follow a public shooting event by blaming graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious regularly that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies promoting a contradictory message.
Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Offered a frequent serving of largely happily-ever-after stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, possibly since it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
