A familiar theme permeates a host of 2025's popular films. This notion that goes back in time to the era of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro investing tens of millions to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring abject destitution, while employing deepfakes and a powerful propaganda machine to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its antagonists enjoy conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the tough people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gleaming towers floating overhead. Even, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to bring about global armageddon — to make money, needless to say.
There is little inherently notable in a string of movies presupposing that rich people have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his always poor Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we never actually consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials react to a public shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting the reverse.
In fact, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Provided with a frequent serving of mostly uplifting fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These movies are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more targeted, and seemingly more lethal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson 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, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so clear that the wealthy live by different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
