A familiar theme runs through numerous 2025's popular films. It's an idea which extends far back to the era of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to defame Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people living in desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its evil characters reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them into unemployment and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, pits the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Even, the agreeably goofy farcical update of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against fat cats, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the defusing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never actually consuming the elite. Whenever politicians react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates regularly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and importance, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies conveying a contradictory message.
If anything, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of largely uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will root out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more direct, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, possibly since it’s become so clear that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Exceptions
Some films diverge, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
