A recurring idea permeates many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends back in time to the time of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Film Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while employing digital impersonations and a sophisticated media apparatus to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its villains live in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them from their homes and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, contrasts the resourceful people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
There’s nothing especially new in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, and clueless rich men. Starting 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 exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is at odds with fundamental decency, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Alters Little
However, inexplicably, we never actually eating the rich. Every time politicians follow a new mass shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the news reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans innately equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after decades of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it appears that the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of mostly uplifting fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about good conquering evil. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will identify any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail ending, possibly since it’s become so apparent that rich people live by different standards, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exceptions
Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the computer world, 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 redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
