A recurring motif runs through numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes all the way back to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist operating a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity as overtly, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them into unemployment and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the scrappy residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit extravagant gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.
It is not especially new in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. From 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 exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is at odds with basic human values, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Alters Little
However, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Every time politicians react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the daily reports makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.
If anything, it seems like the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that impedes real-world action. Given a regular dose of mostly happily-ever-after tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater content about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more targeted, and apparently more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exceptions
Some films diverge, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
