A familiar idea courses through numerous 2025's popular films. It's an idea that stretches back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul spending vast sums to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and framed her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its antagonists live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, sets the resourceful residents of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, of course.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against fat cats, bosses, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is at odds with fundamental decency, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we never actually eating the rich. Every time lawmakers react to a new mass shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. But the daily reports reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans innately equate riches with smartness and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies promoting the reverse.
In fact, it appears that the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that impedes substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of predominantly happily-ever-after fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about justice being served. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will identify any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and apparently more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays 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 exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so clear that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to die at the final act of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Outliers
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
