A familiar motif courses through many of 2025's popular films. This notion which extends far back to the era of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people suffering through extreme hardship, while using digital impersonations and a powerful media apparatus to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality as overtly, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, pits the scrappy residents of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to trigger worldwide catastrophe — to make money, needless to say.
It is not especially new in a string of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding appetite for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against fat cats, authority figures, 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 refreshed a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the defusing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we never actually eating the rich. Whenever elected officials follow a new mass shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. Still the headlines demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of mostly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will weed out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more targeted, and seemingly more lethal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people function with different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to perish at the end of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exclusions
A few stories differ, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
