A familiar motif permeates many of 2025's popular films. This notion which extends all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people living in abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its villains live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in extravagant sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to bring about planetary doom — to make money, naturally.
It is not inherently notable in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme dates back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his always poor Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is at odds with fundamental decency, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we never actually consuming the elite. Every time elected officials respond to a tragic gun violence event by faulting graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. But the headlines reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans innately link affluence to smartness and importance, even after a century of history's most popular movies conveying a contradictory message.
If anything, it appears that the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Provided with a frequent serving of predominantly triumphant fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These movies are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will root out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more targeted, and seemingly more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
