An age-old motif runs through a host of 2025's popular films. This concept that goes far back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a powerful propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its antagonists enjoy obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them into unemployment and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, pits the resourceful inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who live in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding desire 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, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is at odds with core morality, and applaud the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Alters Little
However, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Whenever elected officials react to a public shooting event by blaming violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies conveying the reverse.
In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that impedes real-world action. Given a frequent serving of predominantly triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away feeling good about good conquering evil. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will root out any malicious actors among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more targeted, and seemingly more fatal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exclusions
There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
