A recurring motif permeates many of 2025's popular films. This notion which extends all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his immense fortune to defame Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through desperate poverty, while employing digital impersonations and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its villains live in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, contrasts the resourceful people of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, of course.
There is little especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged desire for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes 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 bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is at odds with fundamental decency, and exalt the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time lawmakers follow a public shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
Actually, it appears that the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes real-world action. Given a steady diet of mostly uplifting fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more specific, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people be taught a 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, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, possibly since it’s become so apparent that rich people live by different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, certainly. 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 virtual grid, 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 antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
