An age-old motif courses through a host of 2025's popular films. This notion that stretches far back to the era of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing vast sums to trap the heroes into a monster-filled arena for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through desperate poverty, while using AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists enjoy conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the tough people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to cause worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, naturally.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies presupposing that rich people have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme dates back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
However, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. On each occasion elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society would not continue to revere billionaires. Still the headlines reveals every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating a contradictory message.
Actually, it seems like the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that impedes real-world action. Given a steady diet of mostly triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, 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 rich individuals were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car ending, likely due to it’s become so clear that the wealthy function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Outliers
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
