A recurring motif permeates many of 2025's popular films. This notion which extends all the way back to the era of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul spending vast sums to throw the heroes into a monster-filled arena for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and framed her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a sophisticated media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, contrasts the tough residents of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to bring about planetary doom — for his own profit, naturally.
It is not particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that rich people have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept dates back to the early days of film, with early comedies setting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, 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 revised that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Whenever politicians react to a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — surely American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. But the news demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a regular dose of largely uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about justice being served. These movies are like ethical parables, implying that the system works, and that plucky heroes will identify any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more violent. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so clear that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the final act of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Outliers
Some films diverge, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled 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 redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
