A familiar motif permeates numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that stretches far back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to defame Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Film Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the resourceful residents of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, naturally.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme goes back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Alters Little
Nevertheless, somehow, we never actually consuming the elite. Whenever politicians respond to a new mass shooting event by blaming graphic media, 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 — undoubtedly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. But the daily reports makes it obvious every single day that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.
In fact, it appears that the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that hinders real-world action. Provided with a frequent serving of largely happily-ever-after tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that plucky heroes will weed out any corrupt individuals among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more direct, and seemingly more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so clear that affluent individuals live by different standards, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exceptions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly 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 Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
