A recurring motif runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a prehistoric arena for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to bring about global armageddon — to make money, naturally.
It is not inherently notable in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians follow a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. But the daily reports reveals regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.
If anything, it appears that the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes real-world action. Given a steady diet of largely triumphant fables 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, pretending that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and seemingly more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, 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 rich individuals were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, possibly since it’s become so apparent that the wealthy function with different standards, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
