A familiar motif permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to defame Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro investing vast sums to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and framed her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Film Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a rich antagonist operating a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while employing deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. 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 live in opulent gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding appetite for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept goes back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against fat cats, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to basic human values, and applaud the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Every time elected officials react to a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.
In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that impedes real-world action. Offered a regular dose of largely happily-ever-after tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about justice being served. These stories are like ethical parables, suggesting that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will identify any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and seemingly more lethal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, 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 eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so clear that affluent individuals function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exceptions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. 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
