A familiar motif runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends back in time to the era of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his immense fortune to smear Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul squandering vast sums to throw the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, all for their own profit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about economic inequality quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, contrasts the resourceful residents of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to bring about planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.
There is little inherently notable in a series of movies presupposing that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we never actually consuming the elite. Whenever politicians react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — surely American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious regularly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.
If anything, it seems like the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Provided with a regular dose of predominantly happily-ever-after tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, possibly since it’s become so clear that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely 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 possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
