A recurring idea permeates many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that goes all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its antagonists enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the resourceful inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to cause planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding hunger for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, for some reason, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Every time politicians react to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the news reveals regularly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and value to society, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies conveying a contradictory message.
Actually, it seems like the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a steady diet of mostly uplifting stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, pretending that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, possibly since it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals live by their own legal rules, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to die at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
