A familiar idea permeates a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that goes back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the tough inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who live in opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — for his own profit, of course.
There is little inherently notable in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is contrary to basic human values, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, somehow, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion politicians react to a new mass shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately equate riches with smartness and importance, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.
Actually, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of largely happily-ever-after stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they indeed follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more specific, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, possibly since it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exceptions
Some films diverge, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
