An age-old theme runs through many of 2025's popular films. It's an idea which extends back in time 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 defame Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing a fortune to throw the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality quite that directly, but its antagonists enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, pits the resourceful people of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in opulent sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy farcical update of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
It is not inherently notable in a series of movies presupposing that rich people have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the early days of film, with early comedies setting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Alters Little
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion politicians follow a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. And yet the news reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it appears that the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes real-world action. Provided with a steady diet of mostly uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will identify any corrupt individuals among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they do follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and apparently more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, possibly since it’s become so obvious that rich people function with different standards, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
