A familiar motif courses through a host of 2025's popular films. This notion that stretches far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering vast sums to trap the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through extreme hardship, while using digital impersonations and a powerful propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to cause worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, of course.
It is not particularly surprising in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding appetite for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme dates back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against corporate bosses, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Fails to Transform
However, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time elected officials react to a public shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to smartness and importance, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating a contradictory message.
Actually, it seems like the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders real-world action. Given a regular dose of largely triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, suggesting that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will root out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more specific, and seemingly more fatal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished 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 antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
