A recurring theme permeates many of 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches back in time to the era of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to smear Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to trap the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through extreme hardship, while using AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, contrasts the resourceful residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in opulent sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.
There is little inherently notable in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Beginning with 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 greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Changes Nothing
However, somehow, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.
Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of predominantly triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any corrupt individuals among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more direct, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, 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 slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Outliers
Some films diverge, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the digital realm, a setup that obviously 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 exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
