A familiar theme runs through numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes back in time to the era of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to throw the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists enjoy conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, sets the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in extravagant gleaming towers above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, needless to say.
It is not especially new in a series of movies presupposing that the affluent have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his always poor Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, authority figures, 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 rapacious, destructive 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 defusing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Release That Alters Little
And yet, somehow, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion lawmakers follow a tragic gun violence event by blaming popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society would not continue to revere billionaires. Still the daily reports makes it obvious constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously equate riches with competence and importance, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies communicating a contradictory message.
If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that impedes real-world action. Offered a steady diet of predominantly uplifting fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These films are like ethical parables, pretending that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any corrupt individuals among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they indeed follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more direct, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so clear that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exclusions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid