A recurring idea permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes far back to the days of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his vast wealth to smear Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity as overtly, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the tough residents of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who live in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, naturally.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept dates back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, 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 updated that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Alters Little
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never get around to eating the rich. Every time lawmakers follow a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. But the headlines reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans innately associate wealth with competence and social worth, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.
Actually, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that hinders substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of predominantly triumphant tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film satisfied about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will identify any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and apparently more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people gain some humility 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, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, possibly since it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals operate under different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the final act of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Exclusions
Some films diverge, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
