A recurring theme courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing tens of millions to throw the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Film Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring abject destitution, while employing 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 antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent sky-high mansions floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to bring about planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.
There is little inherently notable in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding desire for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the early days of film, with early comedies setting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is incompatible with basic human values, and exalt the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Every time lawmakers respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. But the daily reports reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying the reverse.
If anything, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that hinders meaningful change. Given a regular dose of predominantly triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away content about good conquering evil. These films are like cautionary fables, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more direct, and apparently more fatal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people learn a useful 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 rich individuals were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car ending, perhaps because it’s become so clear that rich people function with a separate justice system, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exclusions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
