A familiar motif courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches all the way back to the time of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing vast sums to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity as overtly, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them from their homes and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Remarkably, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
There is little inherently notable in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant 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 updated a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is at odds with fundamental decency, and applaud the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians react to a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting a contradictory message.
Actually, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders real-world action. Offered a regular dose of mostly triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about good conquering evil. These movies are like ethical parables, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will weed out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more lethal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, possibly since it’s become so clear that rich people function with different standards, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exceptions
There are exceptions, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
