A familiar idea courses through many of 2025's popular films. This concept that goes far back to the era of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity quite that directly, but its antagonists live in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, contrasts the tough people of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — to make money, naturally.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his always poor beloved underdog against fat cats, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
However, somehow, we never actually eating the rich. Whenever politicians respond to a new mass shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates constantly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after decades of history's most popular movies conveying a contradictory message.
Actually, it appears that the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that impedes real-world action. Provided with a regular dose of mostly uplifting fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will identify any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more specific, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in humility, 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 fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so clear that affluent individuals operate under a separate justice system, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind 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* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
