A recurring motif courses through a host of 2025's popular films. This notion that stretches all the way back to the days of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering tens of millions to cast the heroes into a monster-filled arena for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Film Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality quite that directly, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them out of jobs and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, contrasts the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to bring about planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled desire for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is at odds with fundamental decency, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Every time elected officials react to a public shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies conveying the reverse.
If anything, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of predominantly triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away feeling good about good conquering evil. These stories are like cautionary fables, pretending that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will identify any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more specific, and observably more violent. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, 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 affluent villains were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car finale, possibly since it’s become so apparent that rich people function with different standards, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exclusions
Some films diverge, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
