A recurring motif runs through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that goes back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his immense fortune to defame Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Film Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people living in abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful propaganda machine to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists enjoy obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the resourceful people of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Even, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a series of movies presupposing that rich people have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. 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 exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Alters Little
And yet, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Every time lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively associate wealth with competence and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that gets in the way of meaningful change. Offered a steady diet of mostly triumphant tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film satisfied about justice being served. These movies are like ethical parables, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more specific, and observably more violent. It is no longer satisfactory 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 oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, possibly since it’s become so clear that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Outliers
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
