A familiar motif runs through numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends back in time to the time of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while employing deepfakes and a sophisticated propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains live in clear extravagance 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 number one movie, pits the tough residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in extravagant sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the lighthearted humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
It is not especially new in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials respond to a public shooting event by blaming violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after decades of history's most popular movies conveying the reverse.
Actually, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of largely happily-ever-after stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about good conquering evil. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people gain some humility 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, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so clear that affluent individuals operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exceptions
Some films diverge, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
