An age-old theme courses through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that goes all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and framed her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a wealthy villain operating a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its antagonists live in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, contrasts the resourceful people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who live in lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.
It is not inherently notable in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the early days of film, with early comedies setting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is contrary to fundamental decency, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Alters Little
Nevertheless, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion politicians follow a new mass shooting event by blaming graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the news reveals regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately equate riches with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.
If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders real-world action. Offered a steady diet of predominantly happily-ever-after stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more specific, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, 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 wealthy people were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people function with different standards, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exclusions
A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
