An age-old idea runs through many of 2025's popular films. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to defame Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Film Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its antagonists reside in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to cause planetary doom — to make money, of course.
There is little especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
And yet, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time politicians follow a new mass shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously link affluence to smartness and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies conveying a contradictory message.
If anything, it seems like the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes meaningful change. Offered a steady diet of largely triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any malicious actors among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they indeed follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and apparently more lethal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people function with different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
