An age-old idea courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes back in time to the era of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring extreme hardship, while using AI forgeries and a sophisticated propaganda machine to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality as overtly, but its evil characters live in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them from their homes and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — to make money, naturally.
There is little inherently notable in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, industrialists, and clueless rich men. 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 replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is incompatible with basic human values, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Alters Little
However, inexplicably, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers respond to a tragic gun violence 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 public consciousness — certainly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. But the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously equate riches with competence and value to society, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
If anything, it seems like the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that hinders substantive reform. Given a regular dose of predominantly triumphant stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, possibly since it’s become so clear that affluent individuals live by a separate justice system, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. 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 unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
