An age-old idea permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to throw the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people living in desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division quite that directly, but its antagonists enjoy conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them from their homes and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, sets the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Even, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a string of movies presupposing that rich people have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme dates back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never actually consuming the elite. Every time elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates regularly that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a regular dose of predominantly triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will weed out any corrupt individuals among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, 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 slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exclusions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
