A familiar idea runs through numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches back in time to the time of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending vast sums to trap the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its villains enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the scrappy residents of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed 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 presume that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Alters Little
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. But the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders real-world action. Given a steady diet of largely uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will identify any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more targeted, and seemingly 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 lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail ending, possibly since it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Exclusions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
