🔗 Share this article

A familiar theme runs through numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the time of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering vast sums to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.

A Tradition of On-Screen Wealth Disparity

In *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about wealth disparity quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in lavish gleaming towers floating overhead. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to cause planetary doom — to make money, of course.

There is little especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against corporate bosses, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to fundamental decency, and exalt the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.

The Outlet That Alters Little

However, for some reason, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Every time politicians respond to a new mass shooting event by faulting graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.

In fact, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of mostly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about good conquering evil. These movies are like ethical parables, pretending that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.

A Sharper Message in 2025

Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they indeed follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more direct, and observably more violent. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."

The "off to face justice" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.

Notable Exceptions

There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid