A familiar theme runs through a host of 2025's popular films. This concept which extends all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul squandering vast sums to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Film Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a rich antagonist running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a sophisticated smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them from their homes and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the scrappy residents of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Even, the agreeably goofy farcical update of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.
There is little inherently notable in a string of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding appetite for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Alters Little
Nevertheless, somehow, we never get around to eating the rich. Every time politicians follow a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. Still the headlines demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a regular dose of mostly happily-ever-after fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, pretending that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more direct, and seemingly more violent. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people function with a separate justice system, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to perish at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Outliers
Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of 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
