A familiar motif permeates a host of 2025's popular films. This notion which extends back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering vast sums to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated propaganda machine to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its villains live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, sets the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in extravagant sky-high mansions floating overhead. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy farcical update of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, naturally.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged desire for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is contrary to core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
However, for some reason, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Every time politicians follow a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — surely American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the headlines makes it obvious constantly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.
Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of real-world action. Provided with a steady diet of predominantly triumphant fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film feeling good about good conquering evil. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will root out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more direct, and seemingly more fatal. 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 forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car finale, possibly since it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under different standards, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exclusions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
