A familiar idea permeates numerous 2025's popular films. This notion which extends far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while employing digital impersonations and a sophisticated smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Interestingly, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to trigger worldwide catastrophe — to make money, of course.
There is little especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept dates back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, industrialists, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is contrary to fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, somehow, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. And yet the news demonstrates regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately equate riches with intelligence and importance, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies promoting a contradictory message.
If anything, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that hinders meaningful change. Given a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about justice being served. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will identify any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new 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 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, selfish, cruel affluent villains were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to die at the final act of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Outliers
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid