A familiar theme courses through numerous 2025's popular films. This notion that stretches back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul squandering vast sums to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people living in abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains live in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, pits the tough residents of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in opulent gleaming towers floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, needless to say.
It is not inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding desire for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, bosses, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never get around to eating the rich. Every time elected officials respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. Still the news reveals regularly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.
If anything, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about good conquering evil. These films are like ethical parables, pretending that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people gain some humility 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 affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Outliers
There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
