A familiar motif courses through numerous 2025's popular films. This concept which extends all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul squandering a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Tradition of On-Screen 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 enduring abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them into unemployment and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the tough people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish gleaming towers in the sky. Even, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a series of movies presupposing that the affluent have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, 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 chronically destitute iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
Nevertheless, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion politicians respond to a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately link affluence to smartness and importance, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies conveying the reverse.
In fact, it appears that the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that impedes meaningful change. Given a steady diet of mostly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they indeed follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and apparently more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, 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, greedy, hateful rich individuals were killed 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 executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so clear that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exclusions
A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
