A recurring motif runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the era of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his vast wealth to defame Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul spending vast sums to trap the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Film 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 extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated media apparatus to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight economic inequality as overtly, but its villains live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, pits the tough people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — for his own profit, naturally.
It is not inherently notable in a string of movies presupposing that the affluent have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his always poor beloved underdog against fat cats, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. From 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 Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. But the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a steady diet of mostly triumphant tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will identify any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more targeted, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, 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, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, possibly since it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exceptions
Some films diverge, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the virtual grid, 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 redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
