An age-old theme permeates many of 2025's popular films. This notion that stretches far back to the days of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and set her up for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, contrasts the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent sky-high mansions above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to cause worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, of course.
It is not especially new in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme dates back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor beloved underdog against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is incompatible with fundamental decency, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
However, inexplicably, we never actually eating the rich. Whenever lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. But the news reveals regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately equate riches with smartness and importance, even after decades of history's most popular movies communicating a contradictory message.
If anything, it seems like the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that impedes real-world action. Offered a steady diet of mostly happily-ever-after fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about justice being served. These stories are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more direct, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car finale, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that the wealthy live by different standards, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Exceptions
Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined 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 transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
