A familiar idea permeates a host of 2025's popular films. This concept which extends all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated media apparatus to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them from their homes and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the resourceful inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish sky-high mansions floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, 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 updated the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is contrary to fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Release That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials follow a new mass shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the news makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies conveying a contradictory message.
If anything, it seems like the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a frequent serving of largely triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film content about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more specific, and seemingly more lethal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, 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 rich individuals were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail finale, possibly since it’s become so clear that affluent individuals live by a separate justice system, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exclusions
A few stories differ, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the virtual grid, 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 wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
