A familiar motif permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes far back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to throw the heroes into a monster-filled arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people living in extreme hardship, while employing digital impersonations and a sophisticated media apparatus to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity quite that directly, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the resourceful people of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to bring about global armageddon — to make money, naturally.
There is little inherently notable in a string of movies presupposing that the affluent have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept dates back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his always poor beloved underdog against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is at odds with core morality, and applaud the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
However, inexplicably, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Every time lawmakers follow a tragic gun violence event by faulting 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 cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. Still the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a significant portion of Americans innately link affluence to competence and value to society, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.
In fact, it appears that the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that impedes real-world action. Provided with a steady diet of predominantly happily-ever-after stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about justice being served. These movies are like ethical parables, implying that the system works, and that plucky heroes will weed out any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A Sharper Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they do follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more specific, and seemingly more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays 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, greedy, hateful wealthy people were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, likely due to it’s become so clear that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
