An age-old theme courses through a host of 2025's popular films. This notion that goes far back to the days of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his immense fortune to defame Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending a fortune to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while using AI forgeries and a powerful propaganda machine to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality quite that directly, but its villains reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in extravagant sky-high mansions above the clouds. Interestingly, the zany farcical update of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to trigger worldwide catastrophe — to make money, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a series of movies presupposing that rich people have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding appetite for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time lawmakers follow a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the news demonstrates constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and social worth, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.
If anything, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of predominantly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These stories are like cautionary fables, pretending that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more targeted, and apparently more lethal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson 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, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exclusions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
