An age-old motif runs through numerous 2025's popular films. This concept that stretches back in time to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to defame Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Film Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while using AI forgeries and a powerful propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division quite that directly, but its villains reside in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in opulent sky-high mansions above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to cause global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
There is little especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against corporate bosses, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit 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 affluence is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the defusing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers follow a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. But the daily reports makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.
If anything, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes real-world action. Provided with a frequent serving of largely triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These stories are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will root out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more direct, and seemingly more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Outliers
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. 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 culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
