A familiar theme permeates numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept which extends back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul spending vast sums to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people living in desperate poverty, while using digital impersonations and a powerful media apparatus 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 reside in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the tough inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gleaming towers above the clouds. Even, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, of course.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is contrary to core morality, and applaud the defusing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
However, for some reason, we never actually eating the rich. Every time elected officials follow a public shooting event by blaming graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that susceptible — if regular exposure 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 constantly that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.
If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that impedes real-world action. Provided with a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These films are like cautionary fables, suggesting that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more targeted, and seemingly more lethal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, 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, selfish, cruel affluent villains were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so clear that rich people live by different standards, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Outliers
Some films diverge, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the digital realm, teasing that he is 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 revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
