A recurring theme permeates many of 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends all the way back to the time of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people living in abject destitution, while employing digital impersonations and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight economic inequality as overtly, but its villains enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, contrasts the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent sky-high mansions floating overhead. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.
It is not particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against corporate bosses, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
However, somehow, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials follow a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.
Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a regular dose of predominantly uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about good conquering evil. These stories are like cautionary fables, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people gain some humility 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 slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*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 gunned down directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail ending, possibly since it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Exceptions
Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
