An age-old theme courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This notion that stretches back in time to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering tens of millions to cast the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring extreme hardship, while using deepfakes and a sophisticated smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, pits the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.
It is not particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme dates back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies setting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with 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 entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never actually eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers follow a new mass shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.
Actually, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a regular dose of largely triumphant tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about good conquering evil. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to die at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
