An age-old theme runs through numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes back in time to the era of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity as overtly, but its evil characters reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the tough inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.
It is not inherently notable in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against corporate bosses, industrialists, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Outlet That Alters Little
However, for some reason, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies conveying a contradictory message.
Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a frequent serving of mostly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about good conquering evil. These movies are like cautionary fables, implying that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more lethal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, likely due to it’s become so clear that affluent individuals function with a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
