A familiar motif runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes all the way back to the days of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his immense fortune to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring abject destitution, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, pits the resourceful people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who live in extravagant sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
There is little inherently notable in a series of movies presupposing that rich people have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against corporate bosses, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
And yet, inexplicably, we never get around to eating the rich. Every time elected officials follow a tragic gun violence event by faulting graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. Still the daily reports makes it obvious regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and value to society, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it appears that the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Provided with a regular dose of predominantly happily-ever-after fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy live by a separate justice system, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exclusions
Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
