A familiar motif courses through many of 2025's popular films. This concept that stretches back in time to the time of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful media apparatus to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity as overtly, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, sets the scrappy residents of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding appetite for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against fat cats, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Alters Little
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a tragic gun violence event by faulting graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the news demonstrates constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to smartness and value to society, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies conveying the reverse.
In fact, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of largely happily-ever-after stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film satisfied about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will identify any malicious actors among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they indeed follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more direct, and apparently more lethal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people gain some humility 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, greedy, hateful wealthy people were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exceptions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the computer world, a setup that obviously 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 antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
