An age-old idea permeates many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches all the way back to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while using AI forgeries and a sophisticated media apparatus to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the tough people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish gleaming towers floating overhead. Interestingly, the zany humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — for financial gain, naturally.
There is little particularly surprising in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against corporate bosses, authority figures, and clueless rich men. From 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 greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the defusing, downfall, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never get around to eating the rich. Every time elected officials respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the news reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.
Actually, it appears that the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a steady diet of predominantly happily-ever-after stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up 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 improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, possibly since it’s become so apparent that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exclusions
Some films diverge, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
