A familiar idea permeates many of 2025's popular films. This concept that stretches back in time to the era of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his vast wealth to smear Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering vast sums to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Film Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity quite that directly, but its evil characters reside in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Interestingly, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is at odds with fundamental decency, and exalt the defusing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
However, somehow, we never actually consuming the elite. Every time elected officials respond to a public shooting event by blaming graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the news demonstrates constantly that a significant portion of Americans innately equate riches with smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying a contradictory message.
If anything, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of largely triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about good conquering evil. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will weed out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they do follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car ending, possibly since it’s become so clear that the wealthy live by a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. 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 revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
