A recurring motif runs through many of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul squandering tens of millions to trap the heroes into a monster-filled arena for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people suffering through extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains reside in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, pits the resourceful people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who live in lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* revolves around 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 affluent have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme dates back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, 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 the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is contrary to basic human values, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials follow a tragic gun violence event by faulting graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. Still the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
If anything, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders meaningful change. Provided with a frequent serving of largely uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These movies are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more specific, and observably more lethal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, perhaps because it’s become so clear that rich people live by a separate justice system, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the final act of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exclusions
There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
