A familiar motif permeates a host of 2025's popular films. It's an idea that stretches all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his enormous resources to defame Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul spending vast sums to throw the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and framed her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality quite that directly, but its antagonists enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the tough people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Even, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to bring about planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.
There is little especially new in a string of movies presupposing that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting 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 rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Alters Little
And yet, for some reason, we never actually eating the rich. Every time lawmakers respond to a new mass shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. And yet the news reveals regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of meaningful change. Provided with a regular dose of mostly uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away feeling good about good conquering evil. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that plucky heroes will weed out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more direct, and seemingly more lethal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, 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 affluent villains were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals live by different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
