🔗 Share this article

An age-old theme courses through a host of 2025's popular films. It's an idea that goes far back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing vast sums to trap the heroes into a monster-filled death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.

A Lineage of Film Wealth Disparity

In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them from their homes and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, of course.

There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies presupposing that rich people have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies pitting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is at odds with core morality, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.

The Outlet That Alters Little

However, inexplicably, we never actually consuming the elite. Whenever elected officials follow a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. Still the daily reports makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting the reverse.

In fact, it seems like the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of mostly uplifting tales 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 ethical parables, suggesting that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.

An Angrier Edge in 2025

But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more direct, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car ending, likely due to it’s become so clear that the wealthy function with different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.

Notable Outliers

There are exceptions, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up 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 redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid