An age-old motif runs through numerous 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 evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his vast wealth to defame Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to trap the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its villains live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to cause planetary doom — for his own profit, naturally.
There is little particularly surprising in a series of movies assuming as fact that rich people 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 stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against tycoons, industrialists, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
However, for some reason, we never actually consuming the elite. Every time lawmakers follow a public shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies communicating a contradictory message.
If anything, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of largely triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about good conquering evil. These films are like ethical parables, pretending that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more specific, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under different standards, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Outliers
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
