A familiar idea runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches far back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to defame Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled arena for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a sophisticated propaganda machine to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division as overtly, but its villains reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the scrappy residents of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Even, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to cause worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a string of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, 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 revised that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
And yet, somehow, we never actually eating the rich. On each occasion politicians respond to a public shooting event by blaming graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the daily reports reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously link affluence to competence and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that hinders substantive reform. Provided with a steady diet of largely triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These movies are like cautionary fables, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will identify any corrupt individuals among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more targeted, and apparently more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, 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, selfish, cruel rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few 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 fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Outliers
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined 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 transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
