An age-old idea courses through a host of 2025's popular films. It's an idea that goes all the way back to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and framed her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while using AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Even, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to trigger worldwide catastrophe — to make money, of course.
It is not particularly surprising in a series of movies presupposing that the affluent have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting 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 exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Every time lawmakers react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. And yet the news demonstrates regularly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies conveying the reverse.
In fact, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a regular dose of mostly triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film satisfied about justice being served. These films are like cautionary fables, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will root out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they do follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and apparently more lethal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so clear that affluent individuals operate under different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exclusions
There are exceptions, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
