A familiar idea runs through many of 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends far back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to defame Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering tens of millions to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and framed her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its villains live in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged desire for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Release That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, somehow, we never actually consuming the elite. Whenever elected officials react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. But the headlines reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting a contradictory message.
If anything, it seems like the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that hinders real-world action. Offered a regular dose of largely uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about good conquering evil. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will root out any corrupt individuals among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more direct, and observably 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 exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, possibly since it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Exceptions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
