An age-old idea runs through many of 2025's popular films. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its evil characters live in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, pits the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, needless to say.
It is not inherently notable in a run of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme dates back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor Little Tramp character against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and exalt the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time elected officials react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — certainly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously equate riches with competence and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies conveying a contradictory message.
If anything, it appears that the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders substantive reform. Given a regular dose of mostly uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more direct, and observably more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car ending, possibly since it’s become so apparent that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exceptions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
