A recurring idea runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches back in time to the time of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro investing a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Film Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through desperate poverty, while using deepfakes and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them out of jobs and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, contrasts the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, of course.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion elected officials react to a public 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 cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously link affluence to smartness and importance, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.
Actually, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders real-world action. Given a frequent serving of mostly happily-ever-after fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will root out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they indeed follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so clear that the wealthy function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exclusions
Some films diverge, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
