A familiar motif permeates numerous 2025's popular films. This notion that stretches far back to the time of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled death trap to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity as overtly, but its antagonists reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to bring about global armageddon — to make money, needless to say.
It is not particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding appetite for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is contrary to core morality, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
And yet, somehow, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Whenever politicians react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. But the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and importance, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater content about good conquering evil. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and seemingly more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people gain some humility 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, greedy, hateful wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
