A familiar motif runs through many of 2025's popular films. It's an idea that goes far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his vast wealth to defame Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering tens of millions to cast the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people living in desperate poverty, while using AI forgeries and a sophisticated media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its villains live in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Even, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, of course.
There is little especially new in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is at odds with core morality, and applaud the defusing, downfall, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never actually consuming the elite. On each occasion politicians follow a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the headlines makes it obvious constantly that a alarming number of Americans innately equate riches with intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies promoting the opposite.
If anything, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that hinders substantive reform. Given a steady diet of predominantly uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like ethical parables, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they do follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more specific, and seemingly more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory 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 oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so clear that affluent individuals function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
