A familiar motif permeates a host of 2025's popular films. This concept that goes all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a rich antagonist operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about wealth disparity quite that directly, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — for his own profit, of course.
There is little especially new in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding hunger for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to basic human values, and applaud the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers follow a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the headlines makes it obvious every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately equate riches with competence and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies promoting the opposite.
If anything, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Provided with a steady diet of predominantly uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film satisfied about good conquering evil. These stories are like moral fairy tales, pretending that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people be taught a lesson 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 rich individuals were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals live by a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to die at the final act of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled 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 redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
