An age-old idea runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes all the way back to the days of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending a fortune to throw the heroes into a prehistoric arena for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Film Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality quite that directly, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them from their homes and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, pits the resourceful people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to bring about global armageddon — to make money, naturally.
It is not inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against corporate bosses, bosses, 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 updated the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Whenever lawmakers follow a tragic gun violence event by faulting graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious constantly that a alarming number of Americans innately link affluence to smartness and value to society, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies conveying the reverse.
Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes meaningful change. Given a steady diet of predominantly uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about right prevailing. These movies are like ethical parables, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more targeted, and seemingly more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, 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 killed by mythological beasts (*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 a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people live by different standards, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exceptions
There are exceptions, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer 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* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
