A familiar idea permeates many of 2025's popular films. This notion that stretches back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people enduring abject destitution, while employing deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its evil characters live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, sets the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — to make money, of course.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that rich people have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled desire for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme dates back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
However, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a new mass shooting event by blaming violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. But the news reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies promoting the opposite.
Actually, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about justice being served. These movies are like cautionary fables, suggesting that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays 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 wealthy people were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so clear that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Outliers
There are exceptions, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
