A familiar idea permeates many of 2025's popular films. This notion which extends back in time to the time of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his immense fortune to smear Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro investing tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a sophisticated propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its villains reside in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, sets the resourceful residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — to make money, naturally.
There is little especially new in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against corporate bosses, bosses, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
And yet, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a public shooting event by blaming violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. But the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and value to society, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies promoting the reverse.
Actually, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes substantive reform. Given a regular dose of largely triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about justice being served. These movies are like cautionary fables, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will identify any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It’s rarely enough nowadays 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 exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*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 at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals operate under different standards, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to die at the final act of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exceptions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
