A recurring motif permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his enormous resources to defame Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul investing vast sums to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Film Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people living in desperate poverty, while using AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity quite that directly, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the tough inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent sky-high mansions above the clouds. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
However, for some reason, we never get around to eating the rich. Every time politicians react to a new mass shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. Still the news demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and social worth, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies communicating a contradictory message.
Actually, it seems like the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes meaningful change. Offered a frequent serving of mostly uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and observably more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era 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 wealthy people were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exclusions
Some films diverge, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the computer world, where he’s clearly 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 Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
