A recurring motif courses through many of 2025's popular films. This notion which extends back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector 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 dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and framed her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Film Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its evil characters enjoy obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the tough residents of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to cause planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.
There is little inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding appetite for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies setting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Alters Little
Nevertheless, somehow, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. And yet the news demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with competence and importance, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies conveying the reverse.
If anything, it seems like the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Given a regular dose of predominantly triumphant tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they indeed follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Outliers
Some films diverge, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
