A recurring theme courses through many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes all the way back to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people living in extreme hardship, while using deepfakes and a sophisticated media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality quite that directly, but its villains reside in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, contrasts the scrappy residents of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to cause worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, naturally.
There is little especially new in a series of movies presupposing that rich people have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Every time lawmakers respond to a public shooting event by blaming violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting a contradictory message.
If anything, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a steady diet of largely happily-ever-after fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away feeling good about right prevailing. These movies are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will identify any corrupt individuals among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more specific, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson 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, greedy, hateful rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exceptions
Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. 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 unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
