A familiar idea runs through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that goes all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing tens of millions to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while employing AI forgeries and a sophisticated propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them from their homes and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to bring about global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against fat cats, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the defusing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Outlet That Alters Little
Nevertheless, somehow, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians react to a new mass shooting event by faulting graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious constantly that a alarming number of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after decades of history's most popular movies promoting the reverse.
In fact, it appears that the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes meaningful change. Given a steady diet of predominantly triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will root out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more specific, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people learn a useful 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, greedy, hateful rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals live by their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exclusions
Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
