A familiar motif runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes far back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his vast wealth to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while employing digital impersonations and a well-honed smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains live in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, contrasts the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — to make money, naturally.
It is not especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against fat cats, bosses, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is at odds with core morality, and exalt the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never actually eating the rich. Whenever politicians respond to a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. Still the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a alarming number of Americans innately link affluence to smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies conveying the reverse.
In fact, it looks as though the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders meaningful change. Offered a steady diet of largely triumphant tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will identify any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more specific, and apparently more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail finale, possibly since it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the final act of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
