An age-old theme runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches far back to the era of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people suffering through extreme hardship, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed propaganda machine to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who live in extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to cause worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged desire for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Alters Little
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion elected officials react to a public shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — surely American society would not continue to worship billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans innately equate riches with smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.
If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a regular dose of mostly triumphant tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away satisfied about good conquering evil. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and observably more lethal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals function with a separate justice system, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to perish at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exceptions
A few stories differ, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly 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 unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
