An age-old motif runs through numerous 2025's popular films. It's an idea that goes all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his immense fortune to defame Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul spending a fortune to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, all for their own profit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful propaganda machine 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, forcing them out of jobs and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, sets the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in extravagant sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is at odds with fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
And yet, inexplicably, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion elected officials follow a new mass shooting event by blaming violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. And yet the news reveals regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it appears that the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that impedes substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away satisfied about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will root out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they do follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more direct, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail ending, possibly since it’s become so obvious that rich people function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled 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 wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
