A recurring motif permeates a host of 2025's popular films. It's an idea that stretches back in time to the days of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending vast sums to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its antagonists reside in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, pits the resourceful inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit extravagant gleaming towers above the clouds. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
There is little inherently notable in a series of movies presupposing that rich people have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is at odds with fundamental decency, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Alters Little
Nevertheless, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion elected officials respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans innately link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies conveying a contradictory message.
In fact, it seems like the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that hinders meaningful change. Provided with a steady diet of largely happily-ever-after tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they indeed follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people be taught a 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, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that rich people live by a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exceptions
Some films diverge, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses 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
