A recurring idea runs through numerous 2025's popular films. It's an idea that stretches back in time to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity quite that directly, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — to make money, needless to say.
There’s nothing especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged desire for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is at odds with core morality, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Alters Little
However, somehow, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time politicians react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. Still the headlines reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to intelligence and importance, even after decades of history's most popular movies promoting a contradictory message.
If anything, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders real-world action. Offered a frequent serving of predominantly happily-ever-after fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These movies are like cautionary fables, pretending that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will weed out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more direct, and apparently more violent. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people gain some humility 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 wealthy people were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail finale, possibly since it’s become so clear that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the computer world, 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 antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
