A familiar idea permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to defame Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a rich antagonist running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people suffering through extreme hardship, while employing digital impersonations and a sophisticated propaganda machine to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division as overtly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, pits the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in extravagant gleaming towers above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is at odds with basic human values, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we never actually consuming the elite. Every time elected officials react to a public shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. Still the headlines makes it obvious regularly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to intelligence and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies conveying the reverse.
Actually, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders real-world action. Provided with a steady diet of mostly happily-ever-after fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away satisfied about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more direct, and apparently more lethal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, 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 killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so clear that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exceptions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
