A recurring motif permeates many of 2025's popular films. This concept which extends back in time to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting 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 wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful propaganda machine to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, contrasts the tough people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Interestingly, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a series of movies presupposing that rich people have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor beloved underdog against corporate bosses, authority figures, 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 revised that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is at odds with fundamental decency, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
However, somehow, we never actually consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials follow a public shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. But the headlines reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans innately link affluence to competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.
Actually, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Provided with a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will identify any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more violent. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under different standards, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exclusions
There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
