A familiar theme runs through numerous 2025's popular films. It's an idea that goes far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people living in desperate poverty, while using deepfakes and a well-honed smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality as overtly, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, contrasts the tough people of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, naturally.
There is little inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, 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 revised that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is at odds with basic human values, and exalt the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Outlet That Alters Little
And yet, somehow, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion politicians react to a public shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — surely American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the headlines makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and importance, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a frequent serving of mostly happily-ever-after tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away feeling good about good conquering evil. These movies are like ethical parables, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more lethal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, 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 rich individuals were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, possibly since it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under different standards, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Outliers
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
