An age-old theme permeates many of 2025's genre movies. This notion that stretches all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled arena to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people living in desperate poverty, while using digital impersonations and a sophisticated propaganda machine to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its villains live in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.
It is not especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the defusing, downfall, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, somehow, we never actually eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers follow a tragic gun violence event by blaming graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the daily reports makes it obvious regularly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies promoting the opposite.
If anything, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders real-world action. Provided with a steady diet of mostly happily-ever-after stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will root out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they do follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to perish at the final act of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
