An age-old motif permeates a host of 2025's popular films. This notion that goes all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering 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 ultra-rich lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and framed her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated propaganda machine to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains enjoy conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, pits the resourceful inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in lavish sky-high mansions floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, naturally.
There is little especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. From 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 complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials respond to a new mass shooting event by faulting 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 collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious regularly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and social worth, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting the reverse.
If anything, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders real-world action. Provided with a steady diet of largely happily-ever-after tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will identify any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more direct, and seemingly more violent. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exceptions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits 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
