A familiar motif courses through many of 2025's popular films. This notion which extends far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his enormous resources to defame Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul spending vast sums to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a powerful propaganda machine to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, contrasts the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Even, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is contrary to basic human values, and exalt the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials follow a public shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. But the news makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately link affluence to intelligence and importance, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies conveying a contradictory message.
In fact, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that hinders meaningful change. Provided with a regular dose of mostly triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about good conquering evil. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more specific, and apparently more violent. It is seldom sufficient 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 oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, possibly since it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals operate under a separate justice system, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exceptions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
