🔗 Share this article

An age-old idea runs through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that goes all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and framed her for murder, all for their financial benefit.

A Lineage of Film Wealth Disparity

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people living in desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity quite that directly, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit extravagant gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.

It is not particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, 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 the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.

The Release That Changes Nothing

And yet, inexplicably, we never get around to eating the rich. Whenever politicians follow a tragic gun violence event by faulting popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates regularly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with smartness and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting the reverse.

In fact, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of largely uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will identify any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.

An Angrier Message in 2025

Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, possibly since it’s become so apparent that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."

The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.

Significant Exclusions

Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses 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