A recurring motif courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes all the way back to the era of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to trap the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people living in desperate poverty, while using digital impersonations and a sophisticated propaganda machine to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the scrappy residents of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — to make money, needless to say.
It is not particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his always poor beloved underdog against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. 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 entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Fails to Transform
However, inexplicably, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Whenever politicians respond to a new mass shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. But the daily reports demonstrates regularly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after decades of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of meaningful change. Provided with a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they indeed follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more targeted, and seemingly more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era 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 exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so clear that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exclusions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
