A recurring idea permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends back in time to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his vast wealth to smear Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about economic inequality quite that directly, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy farcical update of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.
There is little particularly surprising in a series of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, no morals or empathy, 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 the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against corporate bosses, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
However, somehow, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers respond to a tragic gun violence event by blaming graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the news demonstrates constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to smartness and value to society, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders meaningful change. Given a regular dose of largely happily-ever-after stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more direct, and observably more lethal. It’s rarely enough nowadays 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 oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that the wealthy function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exceptions
Some films diverge, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
