An age-old motif runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes all the way back to the days of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul spending tens of millions to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people suffering through extreme hardship, while using digital impersonations and a sophisticated smear campaign to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the resourceful residents of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit extravagant gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — to make money, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding appetite for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion politicians follow a tragic gun violence event by faulting popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. But the daily reports reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and importance, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies promoting the reverse.
Actually, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Provided with a regular dose of largely triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These movies are like cautionary fables, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and seemingly more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, possibly since it’s become so clear that the wealthy function with a separate justice system, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the final act of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
