A recurring theme courses through many of 2025's popular films. This notion that goes back in time to the days of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to smear Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering vast sums to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about economic inequality as overtly, but its evil characters reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them from their homes and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Even, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to cause worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing especially new in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding desire for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. 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 greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
However, somehow, we never actually consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials respond to a new mass shooting event by faulting graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. But the news reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to intelligence and social worth, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies conveying the reverse.
In fact, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that hinders substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of mostly uplifting stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like cautionary fables, suggesting that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more direct, and apparently more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*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 gunned down at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exceptions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
