An age-old idea permeates many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a sophisticated media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity quite that directly, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — to make money, of course.
It is not especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that rich people have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding appetite for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme dates back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his always poor beloved underdog against corporate bosses, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the defusing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians respond to a public shooting event by faulting graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society would not continue to revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a significant portion of Americans innately link affluence to competence and social worth, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies promoting the reverse.
In fact, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that hinders real-world action. Given a regular dose of mostly uplifting fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about good conquering evil. These movies are like ethical parables, pretending that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more direct, and seemingly more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, 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 rich individuals were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, possibly since it’s become so clear that the wealthy live by a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exceptions
There are exceptions, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined 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 reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
