An age-old motif courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends far back to the era of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in abject destitution, while using digital impersonations and a well-honed media apparatus to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, sets the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding appetite for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
And yet, for some reason, we never actually eating the rich. On each occasion elected officials react to a public shooting event by blaming violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. And yet the news demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously link affluence to intelligence and social worth, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies promoting a contradictory message.
Actually, it seems like the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that impedes real-world action. Offered a steady diet of largely uplifting stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about good conquering evil. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson 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, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exceptions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
