A recurring theme courses through many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his vast wealth to defame Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing tens of millions to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Film Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while employing digital impersonations and a well-honed smear campaign to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity quite that directly, but its antagonists enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to bring about worldwide catastrophe — to make money, naturally.
There is little inherently notable in a string of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the defusing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, for some reason, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. But the daily reports makes it obvious every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies conveying the opposite.
If anything, it looks as though the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of meaningful change. Offered a steady diet of predominantly uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will identify any corrupt individuals among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and apparently more violent. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, possibly since it’s become so apparent that rich people function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
