A familiar theme runs through many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to defame Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to throw the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while using deepfakes and a well-honed smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is contrary to core morality, and applaud the defusing, downfall, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Outlet That Alters Little
Nevertheless, somehow, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Whenever elected officials respond to a new mass shooting event by blaming graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. Still the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and value to society, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies conveying a contradictory message.
If anything, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a frequent serving of mostly triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and apparently more lethal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car ending, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. 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 thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
