A recurring motif courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends back in time to the days of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to throw the heroes into a monster-filled arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Film Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity quite that directly, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the resourceful residents of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to cause planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Every time elected officials react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously equate riches with intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.
If anything, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that hinders real-world action. Given a regular dose of mostly happily-ever-after fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more targeted, and seemingly more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays 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, greedy, hateful wealthy people were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so clear that rich people live by different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Outliers
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* ends up banished to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of 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
