An age-old idea courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing tens of millions to cast the heroes into a monster-filled death trap to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Film Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a sophisticated media apparatus to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists enjoy conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, sets the tough people of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who live in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, of course.
There’s nothing especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies setting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with basic human values, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Release That Changes Nothing
And yet, somehow, we never actually eating the rich. Whenever politicians react to a new mass shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a significant portion of Americans innately link affluence to competence and value to society, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.
In fact, it appears that the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of mostly triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about good conquering evil. These stories are like cautionary fables, suggesting that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will root out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they do follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era 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 exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals live by different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Exceptions
A few stories differ, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
