An age-old theme courses through numerous 2025's popular films. This concept that goes all the way back to the time of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while employing deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity as overtly, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, contrasts the resourceful people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Even, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a series of movies presupposing that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme dates back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated 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 presume that affluence is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the defusing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we never actually eating the rich. Every time lawmakers react to a new mass shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — certainly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious every single day that a significant portion of Americans innately link affluence to competence and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies communicating a contradictory message.
If anything, it appears that the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes meaningful change. Offered a steady diet of largely uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, 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 wealthy people were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail finale, likely due to it’s become so clear that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the digital realm, a setup that obviously 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 wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid