An age-old theme runs through many of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes back in time to the time of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending a fortune to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a sophisticated media apparatus to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to cause global armageddon — to make money, needless to say.
It is not inherently notable in a run of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is at odds with core morality, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
And yet, somehow, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Every time politicians follow a public shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies promoting a contradictory message.
In fact, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Given a steady diet of largely triumphant fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away satisfied about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will root out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more specific, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so clear that the wealthy function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exclusions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
