A familiar theme permeates many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division as overtly, but its antagonists live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to bring about worldwide catastrophe — to make money, naturally.
There is little inherently notable in a string of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged desire for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
However, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion elected officials react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. Still the news reveals regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively link affluence to intelligence and importance, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies communicating a contradictory message.
If anything, it appears that the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a regular dose of predominantly uplifting fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These films are like cautionary fables, implying that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more specific, and seemingly more fatal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious 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 isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. 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 revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
