A familiar idea permeates many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that goes back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while using digital impersonations and a powerful media apparatus to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its villains reside in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, of course.
It is not particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme dates back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is incompatible with basic human values, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
And yet, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time elected officials react to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the headlines makes it obvious every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies promoting the reverse.
If anything, it appears that the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of largely uplifting fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about good conquering evil. These stories are like cautionary fables, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and seemingly more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, 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, greedy, hateful affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none 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 different standards, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exceptions
A few stories differ, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
