A familiar idea runs through numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul spending a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while using AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division as overtly, but its villains reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them out of jobs and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in extravagant sky-high mansions floating overhead. Interestingly, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that the affluent have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his always poor Little Tramp character against tycoons, industrialists, 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 refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Every time elected officials respond to a tragic gun violence event by faulting popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies conveying the reverse.
If anything, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders meaningful change. Given a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away satisfied about good conquering evil. These films are like ethical parables, implying that society is just, and that plucky heroes will weed out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more direct, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were killed 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 directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so clear that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exclusions
A few stories differ, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. 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 revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
