A recurring motif courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends back in time to the days of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his immense fortune to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people living in desperate poverty, while employing digital impersonations and a sophisticated media apparatus to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists live in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them into unemployment and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, contrasts the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — to make money, needless to say.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the early days of film, with early comedies setting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Release That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never actually eating the rich. Whenever politicians follow a new mass shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the headlines makes it obvious every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously equate riches with intelligence and value to society, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies promoting the reverse.
Actually, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Given a steady diet of largely triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that the system works, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they do follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more specific, and apparently more violent. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car ending, likely due to it’s become so clear that affluent individuals live by different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
