A familiar motif runs through a host of 2025's popular films. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the days of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to defame Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and framed her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while employing deepfakes and a well-honed smear campaign to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, sets the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Interestingly, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to trigger global armageddon — to make money, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a string of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against fat cats, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is at odds with core morality, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Release That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time elected officials follow a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and social worth, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.
If anything, it appears that the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of meaningful change. Provided with a steady diet of mostly happily-ever-after stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These movies are like ethical parables, suggesting that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will identify any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and seemingly more violent. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on national television (*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 finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals live by a separate justice system, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to perish at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exceptions
Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the computer world, teasing that he is 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 exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
