A familiar theme courses through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that goes far back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul spending tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and framed her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring abject destitution, while using deepfakes and a sophisticated propaganda machine to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the resourceful people of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who live in opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Even, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Alters Little
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever politicians respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at 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 allow it to permeate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the headlines makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.
Actually, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes real-world action. Given a frequent serving of mostly triumphant tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about good conquering evil. These movies are like ethical parables, implying that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any corrupt individuals among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more targeted, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exclusions
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
