A familiar motif runs through numerous 2025's popular films. This concept that stretches far back to the time of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul investing tens of millions to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and framed her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through extreme hardship, while using deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its evil characters reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them from their homes and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, contrasts the tough residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who live in opulent sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the lighthearted farcical update of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies presupposing that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding appetite for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against fat cats, 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 updated that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is at odds with fundamental decency, and celebrate the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Release That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Every time lawmakers react to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the daily reports reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously equate riches with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting the reverse.
In fact, it appears that the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that impedes real-world action. Given a steady diet of predominantly uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and apparently more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, possibly since it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals live by a separate justice system, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Outliers
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply 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* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid