A recurring idea permeates many of 2025's popular films. It's an idea that stretches all the way back to the era of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality quite that directly, but its villains live in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
There is little especially new in a string of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding appetite for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, 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 updated a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, for some reason, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion politicians respond to a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious every single day that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Offered a regular dose of largely happily-ever-after stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they indeed follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more direct, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, 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 eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so clear that affluent individuals live by different standards, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exclusions
Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
