A familiar theme courses through a host 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 envious, ruthless billionaire using his immense fortune to defame Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed smear campaign to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its villains reside in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, pits the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Even, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, needless to say.
There is little particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding appetite for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against corporate bosses, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Changes Nothing
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever politicians respond to a tragic gun violence event by blaming popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the news demonstrates constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting the reverse.
Actually, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that impedes substantive reform. Provided with a steady diet of largely uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These stories are like cautionary fables, pretending that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will root out any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more targeted, and apparently more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death 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 rich people function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exclusions
There are exceptions, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
