An age-old idea courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes far back to the days of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending tens of millions to cast the heroes into a monster-filled death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the tough people of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the zany humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme dates back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, authority figures, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with basic human values, and exalt the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion politicians respond to a new mass shooting event by blaming graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the news reveals every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.
In fact, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that hinders substantive reform. Given a regular dose of predominantly uplifting fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more specific, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car ending, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals live by a separate justice system, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exclusions
There are exceptions, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
