An age-old theme runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches far back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul squandering vast sums to trap the heroes into a prehistoric death trap to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality quite that directly, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, sets the tough people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.
There is little inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, 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 refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Release That Changes Nothing
And yet, inexplicably, we never actually consuming the elite. Whenever elected officials respond to a tragic gun violence event by blaming graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. Still the daily reports makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to competence and importance, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting a contradictory message.
If anything, it seems like the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that hinders substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of largely happily-ever-after fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that determined protagonists will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more specific, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people be taught a lesson 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, selfish, cruel affluent villains were eliminated by mythological beasts (*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 directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that the wealthy live by a separate justice system, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the final act of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Exclusions
Some films diverge, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds 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 redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
