A familiar theme courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends far back to the time of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people suffering through abject destitution, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, pits the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a string of movies presupposing that rich people have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding appetite for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is contrary to fundamental decency, and celebrate the defusing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Fails to Transform
However, inexplicably, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians respond to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates constantly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously equate riches with competence and importance, even after decades of history's most popular movies communicating a contradictory message.
If anything, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Given a steady diet of mostly happily-ever-after stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more direct, and seemingly more lethal. It’s rarely enough these days 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 subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that the wealthy operate under different standards, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exclusions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled 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 reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
