🔗 Share this article

A recurring motif courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the days of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.

A Tradition of Cinematic Wealth Disparity

In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people living in abject destitution, while using deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its villains live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — to make money, of course.

There is little especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.

The Outlet That Alters Little

Nevertheless, somehow, we never actually taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians respond to a new mass shooting event by blaming violent video games, 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 — undoubtedly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. But the daily reports reveals regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and social worth, even after decades of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.

Actually, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that gets in the way of real-world action. Provided with a regular dose of predominantly triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away feeling good about right prevailing. These movies are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.

A Sharper Message in 2025

But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and seemingly more violent. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era 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 subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, possibly since it’s become so clear that affluent individuals function with a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."

The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.

Significant Outliers

A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid