An age-old theme permeates many of 2025's popular films. This notion that goes far back to the time of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul spending a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about wealth disparity quite that directly, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them from their homes and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who live in opulent sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, of course.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme dates back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is at odds with fundamental decency, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Changes Nothing
And yet, somehow, we never get around to eating the rich. Every time politicians react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. But the headlines reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans innately link affluence to competence and importance, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies promoting a contradictory message.
In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a regular dose of largely uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away satisfied about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, suggesting that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more specific, and apparently more lethal. It is seldom sufficient 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 subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so clear that the wealthy function with a separate justice system, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator 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 revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
