A familiar theme courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his immense fortune to defame Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul spending vast sums to throw the heroes into a prehistoric arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality as overtly, but its villains live in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, pits the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in lavish gleaming towers floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Alters Little
Nevertheless, somehow, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Every time politicians react to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. Still the news demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies promoting the reverse.
In fact, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Offered a regular dose of mostly triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away feeling good about good conquering evil. These films are like cautionary fables, suggesting that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
But while 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 apparently more fatal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, 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 fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so clear that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
